Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #296 – Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West About this episode Douglas Murray is an author and political commentator. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:49) – Western civilization
(16:29) – Slavery
(20:06) – Reparations
(25:11) – Institutional racism
(32:24) – Lived experience
(41:49) – Resentment
(53:55) – Critical race theory
(1:08:27) – Racism
(1:27:26) – Stalin
(1:31:59) – Churchill
(1:38:03) – Marxism
(1:54:41) – Madness of Crowds
(2:03:14) – Ego
(2:10:22) – Donald Trump
(2:17:06) – America’s future
(2:24:33) – Advice for young people
(2:33:16) – Love
Transcript 26,489 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, and his most recent book, The War in the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason. He's a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker who points out and pushes back against what he sees as the madness of our modern world. I should note that the use of the word Marxism and "the West" in this conversation refers primarily to cultural Marxism and the cultural values of Western civilization, respectively. This is, in contrast to my previous conversation with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism as primarily a critique of capitalism,
0:45 Lex Fridman? and thus, looking at it through the lens of economics and not culture. Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite of each other with very different perspectives on how we build a flourishing civilization together. I leave it to you, the listener, to think and to decide which is the better way. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Brave for browsing, BetterHelp for mental health, Bioptimizers for magnesium supplementation, Notion for startups, and ExpressVPN for privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads.
1:29 Lex Fridman? As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This show is brought to you by Brave, a fast, privacy-preserving browser that feels like Google Chrome but without ads, with various kinds of tracking that ads can do. I love using it more than any other browser, including Chrome, Chrome being my second favorite browser. I fell in love with Chrome first, and then I met Brave. It's like that meme, you're with your girlfriend, but you're checking out the new girl. But in this case, it wasn't just that the grass is greener on the other side. It turned out, when I went to the other side,
2:14 Lex Fridman? the grass was still greener. So it's from one love to a bigger love.
2:20 Lex Fridman? Overall, as a fan of technological innovation and given all the history of browser wars, it's just exciting and inspiring to see that a new browser comes along that really pushes all the other players to do better. I should also mention they have the Brave search engine, which is great. Get it at brave.com/lex and it might become your favorite browser, too.
2:47 Lex Fridman? This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. I almost struggle spelling help. I need help spelling help. They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours because, friends, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault, Will. If that doesn't at all ring a bell for you, that's from Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite sort of therapist-patient relationship that's not really an actual healthy therapist-patient relationship, but more like a father-son relationship. Yeah. And also just a human
3:32 Lex Fridman? relationship. And that's what great therapy is all about, to a degree. But actually, just the first step of doing therapy, I think, for a lot of people is really helpful, or at least something worth trying. And that's why I should try BetterHelp, because it's easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save money first month. The next sponsor is Bioptimizers. They have a new magnesium supplement. When I fast or I'm doing keto or carnivore, sodium, potassium, and magnesium are essential, and magnesium is the tricky one. You should listen to Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast. Also,
4:14 Lex Fridman? a good friend of mine just texted me, actually, I need to respond to him, and I should probably pause this ad read and respond to him. But instead, I'm gonna finish the ad read. And the ad read goes that there's a magnesium breakthrough from Bioptimizers that you should check out. They solve this problem of magnesium, because most supplements, this is the part of the ad read where we talk trash about the others. They only do one or two forms of magnesium like glycinate and citrate, or perhaps as pronounced citrate. The point is, the chemistry is still the same. In reality, there are at least seven that your body needs and benefits from, and you can get all of this with Bioptimizers, their magnesium breakthrough and plus a special discount,
4:59 Lex Fridman? all at magbreakthrough.com/lex.
5:04 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. People love Notion. Anyone I ask on the internets, on Reddit, Google around, looking for reviews and stuff, when I ask friends and you're talking about note-taking apps, like, what is the cutting edge? It's certainly not the thing I've used for most of my life, which is Emacs. Now, if you're legit, you will still use Emacs or Vim for some things, but surely not for collaboration or for rigorous, organized note-taking. For that, you need something like Notion,
5:49 Lex Fridman? which is what everybody loves. But they also want you to know that if you're in a startup, you can use Notion for that as well. It's kind of like what they're calling a full-on operating system for running your startup. You can get a thousand bucks off the team plan, which is almost one year free for a team of 10, if you go to notion.com/startups. This show is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. You should know, friends, that the ISPs, the internet service providers, can still track you even if you use basic protection like incognito mode on Chrome. They can still get your data and see all the shady websites you've been going to,
6:32 Lex Fridman? which I know you've been going to because I've been watching you. Like the song from The Police, which I wonder if that's a love song or a stalker song.
6:44 Lex Fridman? Every breath you take, every move you make. Probably a stalker song. Well, you could think of your ISPs as a kind of stalker. There you go. You can also change your location, watch your favorite shows. My favorite aspect is that it's just a VPN that works really well. When you connect, it's really fast, which was what matters. It works on almost any device that I'm aware of, an operating system, including Linux, my favorite operating system. Anyway, you can sign up, download, install it. If you go to expressvpn.com/lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Freedom Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
7:28 Lex Fridman? And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.
7:49 Lex Fridman? You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West, which in part says that the values, ideas and history of Western civilization are under attack. So let's start with the basics. Historically and today, what are the ideas that represent Western civilization? The good, the bad, the ugly?
8:08 Douglas Murray? I actually don't get stuck on definitions precisely because, as you know, once you get stuck on definitions, there's a possibility you'll never get off them.
8:15 Lex Fridman? Yes.
8:18 Douglas Murray? I'd say a few things. Firstly, obviously, the Western tradition is a specific tradition, a specific tradition of ideas, culture, well known to be perhaps easily defined by the combination of Athens and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible and the world of ancient Greece and indeed Rome. Effectively creates West, creates European civilization, which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others. But these are the main countries that we still refer to as the West. So there's a specific tradition and all the things that come from it.
8:59 Douglas Murray? My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say, you know when you're not in it. So if you've ever been to Beijing, Shanghai, you know you're not in the West, somewhere else, you know you're not in the West. When you're in Tokyo, somewhere extraordinary, but you know you're not in the West. Obviously, there are, let's say borderline questions like, is Russia in the West? Which I sort of leave open as a question, possibly.
9:33 Lex Fridman? If you were placed into Moscow, blindfolded, and you woke up, and you couldn't hear the language, or maybe you didn't know what the language sounded like, would you guess you were in the West or not?
9:44 Douglas Murray? I think I was somewhere near it.
9:47 Douglas Murray? Getting closer. I mean, you know, it's, it's, well, Tulsa asks the question, doesn't he, whether it's European? And I think the answer to that is not really, although massively influenced by Europe, but, and times wanting to reach towards it, at times wanting to stay away, but, but a part of the West, possibly, yes. But anyway, it's a very specific tradition. It's, it's, it's one of a number of major traditions in the world, and because it's hard to define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
10:21 Lex Fridman? Are there certain characteristics and qualities about the values and the ideas that define it? Is, is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?
10:29 Douglas Murray? Yes. I mean, the rule of law, property-owning democracies, and much more. I mean, these are, of course, things that ended up being developed in America, and then given back to much of the rest of the West. I'd say there are other, perhaps more controversial attributes I would give to the West. One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which is not shared, of course, by every other culture. The late philosopher George Steiner said he could never get out of his head the haunting fact that the boats only seemed to go out from Europe. You know, they didn't, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists, the people who
11:13 Douglas Murray? wanted to discover other civilizations, and indeed even resurrect ancient civilizations and lost civilizations. These were scholars that were always coming from the West to discover this elsewhere. By contrast, you know, there were never boats coming from Egypt to help the Anglo-Saxons discover the origins of their language and so on. So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which can be said to be a Western attribute, although it of course also has, I want to immediately preface it, some downsides and many criticisms that can be made of some of the consequences of that interest. Because of course it's not entirely lacking in self-interest.
11:51 Lex Fridman? So it's not just the scholars, it's also?
11:54 Douglas Murray? The armies.
11:55 Lex Fridman? The armies, and they're looking to gain access and control over resources elsewhere.
12:01 Douglas Murray? To market.
12:02 Lex Fridman? And hence the imperial imperative.
12:05 Douglas Murray? Exactly.
12:06 Lex Fridman? To conquer, to expand.
12:08 Douglas Murray? Although that itself, of course, is a universal thing. I mean, no, no civilization, I think, that we know of doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can. The Western ability to go further, faster certainly gave an advantage in that regard.
12:25 Lex Fridman? Do some civilizations get a bit more excited by that kind of idea than others?
12:30 Douglas Murray? Possible, it's possible.
12:31 Lex Fridman? Because you could say it's the Western civilization, because the technological innovation was more efficient at doing that kind of thing.
12:41 Douglas Murray? Absolutely.
12:42 Lex Fridman? But maybe you wanted it more, too.
12:43 Douglas Murray? Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot and did very terribly well for many centuries. One shouldn't forget that, as did others. I'd also say, by the way, and again, it's a very broad one, but it's worth throwing out there, I think self-criticism is an important attribute to the Western mind, one that, as you know, is not common everywhere. Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics to become rich.
13:14 Lex Fridman? So, you know, criticism is a negative sounding word. It could be self-introspection, self-analysis, self-reflection.
13:22 Douglas Murray? And it can be what you need.
13:25 Douglas Murray? You know, and in the Western system, I'd argue that one of the advantages of the system of representative governance is that where there are problems in the system, you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means. We listen to arguments, most famously in America in the late 20th century. The civil rights movement achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the rest of the country that it had been wrong. That's not common in every society by any means. So I think there are certain attributes to the Western mind that you could say are not entirely unique, but they are not as commonplace elsewhere.
14:07 Lex Fridman? What about the emergence and hierarchies of asymmetry of power most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery, for example?
14:19 Douglas Murray? Well, I mean, everyone in the world did slavery, so I don't regard it as being a Western, a unique Western sin. It's rather hard to think of a civilization in history that didn't have slavery of some kind. One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day is that people seem to imagine that our societies in the West were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices. Alas, this isn't true. It's a sort of Rousseauian mistake, or at least one that's blossomed since Rousseau, that everybody else in the world was born into sort of Edenic innocence and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us that caused us to do bad things to other people. Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world, of course, and through most of the modern world as well, of course.
15:04 Douglas Murray? There are 40 million slaves in the world today, so it's clearly not something that the species as a whole has a problem with. That's more slaves, of course, than there were in the 19th century. And I'd say on top of that, that, you know, the interesting thing about the Western mind as regards to slavery is that we were the civilization that did away with it. And by the way, the founding fathers of America, who today are lambasted routinely for being acquiescent in the slave trade, engaging in it, owning slaves.
15:41 Douglas Murray? There's not, people almost don't even bother now to recognize the fact that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, all wanted to see this trade done away with. Couldn't hold the country together at the origins if they'd have made such an effort and believed and hoped that it would be something that would be dealt with after their time.
16:00 Lex Fridman? So the founding ideas had within them the notion that we should, as a people, get rid of this?
16:07 Douglas Murray? The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence set up the conditions under which slavery will be impossible.
16:16 Lex Fridman? All men are created equal.
16:18 Douglas Murray? Once you, once you've put that, that's like, that's a time bomb under the, under the whole concept of slavery.
16:24 Lex Fridman? That's ticking away. Okay.
16:26 Douglas Murray? And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.
16:30 Lex Fridman? If we just step back and look at the human species, what does slavery teach you about human nature? The fact that slavery
16:41 Lex Fridman? has appeared as a function of society throughout human history?
16:46 Douglas Murray? There are two possibilities.
16:49 Douglas Murray? One is it's what people think they can do when God's not watching.
16:56 Douglas Murray? Another is it's what they can do if they think that God allows it.
17:01 Lex Fridman? Really, really well put. And
17:06 Lex Fridman? the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation, what does that mean?
17:12 Douglas Murray? Well, I mean, it's, it's pretty straightforward in a way.
17:16 Douglas Murray? There are people who get to work for free.
17:18 Lex Fridman? It's economic in nature in some sense.
17:21 Douglas Murray? Yes, but in order to do it, I mean, almost always, there are some examples in the ancient world where this wasn't the case, but almost always it had to be a subjugated people or people that regarded as different. One of the things, actually, I've tried to sort of inject into the discussion through this book, among other things, is a recognition that there were very major questions still going on in the 18th and early 19th century that were unresolved, which were one of the reasons why slavery was not as morally repugnant to people then as it was to us now, as it is to us now. And that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis. At the time of Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers were thinking and working, they didn't
18:05 Douglas Murray? know, because nobody knew whether the human races were related or not.
18:13 Douglas Murray? There were arguments, the monogenesis argument, that we were all indeed from the same racial stock. Polygenesis argument was that we weren't.
18:25 Douglas Murray? Black Africans, Ethiopians, and they're often referred to at the time, because they provided some of the first slaves, were different from white Europeans, simply not related in any way. And that makes it easier, of course. That makes it easier to enslave people if you think they're not your brother. Am I my brother's keeper? No, he's not your brother.
18:47 Douglas Murray? And it was a very troubling argument in the 18th and 19th century, also because there was a biblical question. It threw up a theological question, which was, I mean, people were literally debating this at the time. Was there also a black Adam and Eve?
19:10 Douglas Murray? Was there, as it were, an Indian Adam and Eve, a Native American Adam and Eve? I mean, this was a serious theological debate because they didn't know the answer. And people say that Darwin solved this. It wasn't just Darwin, of course, but by the late 19th century, the argument that we were not all related as human beings had suffered so many blows that you had to really be very, very ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then.
19:43 Lex Fridman? So it no longer was after Darwin, a theological question. It became a moral question.
19:48 Douglas Murray? It was already a moral question, but it clarified. Darwin clarifies it definitely. And then you're in this, as I say, in this situation of you're not subjugating some other people, you're subjugating your own kin. And that becomes morally unsustainable.
20:05 Lex Fridman? So given that slavery in America is part of its history,
20:15 Lex Fridman? how do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today, social discourse, what we learn in school? We can look at slavery in America. We can look at maybe more recent things like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust. How do we incorporate that in terms of how we create policy, how we treat each other, all those kinds of things? What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities, the injustices of the past into the way we are today?
20:53 Douglas Murray? That's a very complex question because it's a moral question at this point and a moral question long after the fact.
21:03 Douglas Murray? I say at one point in the war in the West that the argument, for instance, on reparations now that goes on, and it's not a fringe argument anymore. Some people say, oh, you're pulling up this fringe argument. It really isn't. I mean, every contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk about the possibility of reparations. Some very eager that this country, America, goes through that entirely self-destructive exercise.
21:32 Douglas Murray? I say that there's a lot of problems with this, but if I could refine it out of one thing, I'd say this.
21:38 Douglas Murray? It's no longer about a wealth transfer from one group of people who did something wrong to another group of people who were wronged. It would have been that, it could have been that 200 years ago. Today, it's not even the descendants of people who did something wrong giving money to people who were the descendants of people who were wronged. It's the wealth transfer from people who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged. That's impossible to do. I'm completely clear about this. There is no way in which you could organize such a wealth transfer. On moral or practical reasons, America is filled with people who are, have the same
22:22 Douglas Murray? skin color as us, for instance, who have no connection to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money to people who have some connection. And then the country is also filled with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery, who would not be due for any reimbursement, as it were. The problem with this is, though, is that there are, I'm perfectly open to the possibility that there are residual inequities that exist in American life and that the consequences of slavery could be one of the factors that result from this.
23:03 Douglas Murray? The thing is, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a single issue answer. I think it's a multi-dimensional issue, something like black underachievement in America. It's obviously a multi-dimensional issue. Much of the left and others wish to say, it's not, it's only about racism. And they can't answer why Asians who've arrived more recently don't, for instance, get held down by white supremacy, but actually, I say white supremacy in quotes, obviously, but don't get held back by it, but actually flourish to the extent that Asian Americans
23:41 Douglas Murray? have higher household earnings and higher household mean equity than home equity and so on, than than white Americans. So I don't think that on the merits, the evidence is there that, you know, racism is the explanation for black, ongoing black underachievement in some sections of the black community in America. It's obviously a part of it. Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness and similar family breakdown issues are a long-term consequence of it? Possibly, but it's it's being awfully generous to people's ability to make bad decisions.
24:26 Douglas Murray? For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust would you allow people to claim that everything that went wrong in the Jewish community was as a result of the Holocaust? I mean, is there is there some kind of term limit on this? I would have thought so. And I think most people probably think that's over.
24:44 Lex Fridman? I think the details matter there and but it's very difficult.
24:53 Douglas Murray? You're in deep waters, yeah.
24:54 Lex Fridman? Oh, I enjoy swimming out in the ocean, so although I'm terrified of what's lurking underneath in the darkness.
25:01 Douglas Murray? You're right. You're right to be.
25:03 Lex Fridman? Okay. It's really complicated calculus with the Holocaust and with slavery. So the argument in America is that there there's deep institutional racism against African-Americans that's rooted in slavery. And.
25:27 Lex Fridman? So however that calculus turns out, that calculation, it still persists in the culture, in the institutions, in the allocation of resources, in the way that we communicate in subtle ways and major ways, all that kind of stuff. How is it possible to win or lose that argument of how much institutional racism there is that's rooted in slavery? Is it a winnable?
25:53 Douglas Murray? It's an unquantifiable argument. And I'd like to apply some shortcuts to some of this, the following. Are, for instance, all, let's take the EV one that's most often cited. If a white person is walking down a street in America and they see a group of young black men coming towards them, and it's late at night, and they cross the road, is it because of slavery? Is it because of institutional racism? No, it's because they've made a calculus based not entirely on unfounded beliefs that,
26:37 Douglas Murray? given crime rates, it's possible that this group of people might be a group of people they don't want to meet late at night. That's an ugly fact, but as crime statistics in American cities, after American cities bear out, it's not an entirely unreasonable one. It's not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously. But is it attributable to slavery? That's a stretch. If you're in a city like Chicago where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years,
27:16 Douglas Murray? albeit again, as always has to be remembered, mainly black on black, gun violence and knife violence. Nevertheless, if you're in a city like Chicago and you make that calculus I've just suggested, the cliched one, the street late at night, there are other factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in.
27:41 Douglas Murray? And I'm afraid it's it's something which people don't want particularly acknowledged in America for obvious reasons because it's the ugliest damn debate in the world. But I was actually just writing in my column in New York Post today about a very interesting case that's sort of similar, which is the question of obesity in the US. As you know, America's the most overweight country in the world. America has, I think, forty percent of the population is obese in medical ways, and the nearest next country is a long way down, that's New Zealand, at thirty percent of the population. So America's a long way ahead. Why during the coronavirus era, when we know that obesity is the one clearest factor
28:25 Douglas Murray? that's likely to lead to your hospitalization if you also get the virus? Why did almost no public health information in America focus on obesity? Eighty percent of the people who ended up hospitalized in America with coronavirus were obese. We locked the schools when there was no evidence that the coronavirus was deadly for children. We all wore cloth masks when there was very little evidence that this was much use in stopping the spread of the virus. We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem, and we never addressed it. Why? Is it just because we worried about fat people? No, it's actually because about fat shaming, as it were. No, it's also because to a great extent it's a racial issue in America as well.
29:07 Douglas Murray? And actually, I quoted this new publication from the University of Chicago, as it happens, which makes that claim explicit, says, "The reasons why people have views that are negative about obesity is because of racism and slavery." This is what everything is drawn back to in America. Anything you want to stop, you say it's because of racism, it's because of slavery. How about it's actually because you mind the hospitals getting clogged up, you mind people dying, you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying, and you'd like to say something about it? Once again, as in everything in America, it's cut off by some...
29:46 Douglas Murray? Poorly educated academic saying it's about slavery. So we're really not, I mean, this requires a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society, probably one that's not possible without killing the patient. And it's being done by people who are wearing like mittens.
30:06 Lex Fridman? So I'm sure that there's a few folks listening to this that are rolling their eyes and saying, here we go again, two white guys talking about the lack of institutional racism in America.
30:24 Lex Fridman? First of all, what's your, what would you like to tell them? So our African American friends who are looking at this, and I've gotten a chance to talk to a bunch of them on Clubhouse recently, Clubhouse is this social app.
30:38 Douglas Murray? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:39 Lex Fridman? And I really enjoy.
30:40 Douglas Murray? It's an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see it.
30:42 Lex Fridman? I personally love it because you get to talk to, as somebody who's an introvert and doesn't socialize much, I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life. So it got, it gave me a chance to, first of all, practice Russian and Ukrainian. So I get the chance to do that. Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine with people who are from that part of the world. And you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground where they start screaming, they start crying, they start being calm and collected and thoughtful. And this is as if you walked into a bar with custom picked, regular folks, in quotes, regular folks.
31:26 Lex Fridman? Just people that have quote unquote, lived experiences, real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases, and you get to listen to them go at it with no. Uh, because it's an audio app, you're not allowed to start getting into a physical fistfight. So even though it really sounds like people want to.
31:47 Douglas Murray? Sounds like it's happening, yeah.
31:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling. And for example, it allows a white guy like me from another part of the world, coming from the former Soviet Union, to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans screaming about Joe Rogan using the N-word.
32:09 Douglas Murray? Oh, yeah.
32:09 Lex Fridman? And I get to really listen. There's very different perspectives on that in the African American community, and it's fascinating to listen. So I don't get access to that by sort of excellent books and articles written and so on. You get that real raw emotion. And I'm just saying, there's a few of those folks listening to this with that real raw emotion.
32:29 Douglas Murray? Sure.
32:29 Lex Fridman? And they, one argument they say is you, Douglas Murray, you Lex Fridman, don't have the right to talk about race and racism in America. It is our struggle. You are from a privileged class of people that don't, don't know what it's like to be a black man or woman in America walking down the street. Can you steel man that case?
32:56 Douglas Murray? First of all, fuck that.
32:58 Lex Fridman? That's not, I think we need to define steel, steel manning.
33:02 Douglas Murray? Okay.
33:03 Lex Fridman? Can you at least try it?
33:06 Douglas Murray? I really resent that form of argumentation.
33:09 Lex Fridman? Sure.
33:09 Douglas Murray? I really resent it. I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want. And no one's going to stop me or try to intimidate me.
33:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
33:16 Douglas Murray? Or tell me that I can't simply because of my skin color. And I think that if I said to somebody else the other way around, it would be equally reprehensible. If I said, shut up, you have no right to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says because you've not got my skin color. Okay, it's not an exact comparison, but seriously, is that, is that a reasonable form of argument? Uh, you haven't been through everything I've been through in my life, therefore you can't comment. No. In that case, nobody can talk about anything. We might as well pack up, go home and isolate ourselves.
33:49 Lex Fridman? Strong words, but can you try to steel man that case? Not in this particular situation, but there's people that have lived through something that can comment in a very specific way, like for example Holocaust survivors.
34:02 Douglas Murray? Yes.
34:04 Lex Fridman? There is a sense in which maybe a basic sense of civility. When a Holocaust survivor is speaking about their experience of the Holocaust, then an intellectual from a very different part of the world is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II, just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor.
34:28 Douglas Murray? We would physically interrupt them if they're telling their story.
34:31 Lex Fridman? With logic and reason, that the experience of the Holocaust survivor somehow fundamentally has a deep understanding of the humanity and the injustice of the...
34:43 Douglas Murray? First of all, again, when even deeper waters now, but in terms of wanting to listen to another person who has experienced something, yes, yes, but not endlessly, not endlessly. I mean, there are some people who've written about, I mean, there are people who've written about the Holocaust who didn't experience the Holocaust and have written about it better than people who did. It's not, this, this, this idea that the lived experience, to use this terrible modern jargon, as if there's another type, this, this, this idea that the lived experience has to triumph over everything else is, is not always correct. It can be correct in some circumstances.
35:25 Douglas Murray? If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor and somebody who'd never heard about the Holocaust and wanted to kind of, you know, shoot out their views on it, yeah, one of those people should be heard more than the other, obviously, obviously. If there's somebody who's experienced racism firsthand and there's somebody else who has never experienced it, then obviously you'd want to hear from the person who has experienced it firsthand, if that is the discussion underway. I, I don't think that it's the case that that is endlessly the case. I'm also highly reluctant to concede that there are groups of people who by dint of their skin color or anything else, get to dominate the microphone.
36:10 Douglas Murray? Now, of course, we're literally both speaking into microphones at the moment, so there's an irony to this, but let's skate over the irony. What I mean is people saying you don't have the right to speak. I have the right to take the microphone from you and speak because I know best. Fine, if you know best, we'll argue it out and someone will win, long or short term.
36:33 Douglas Murray? But the, the, um, there's the, the almost aggressive tone in which this is now leveled. I don't like the sound of. Nobody's experience is completely understandable by another human being, nobody's. And what many people are asking us to do at the moment, us collectively, is to fall for that thing. I think it was Camille Foster who said it first, but I've adopted in recent years, is to say, you must spend an inordinate amount of your life trying to understand me personally, my lived experience, everything about me. You should dedicate your life to trying to do that. Simultaneously, you'll never understand me.
37:17 Douglas Murray? This is not an attractive invitation. This is, this is a, an unwinnable game. So if somebody, if somebody has a legitimate, um, and an important point to make, they should make it and they will win through whatever their characteristics, whatever their race. And by the way, there are plenty of white people who experience racism as well. There are plenty of white people who do and have done and increasingly so, which is one of the things I write about in The War on the West. I mean, I, I would argue that today in America, the only group who are actually allowed to be consistently, vilely racist against the white people. If you say disgusting things about black people in America in 2022, you will be over.
38:02 Douglas Murray? You will be over. If you decide to talk about people's white tears, their white female tears, their white guilt, their white privilege, their white rage, and all these other pseudo pathologizing terms. You'll be just fine. You could be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You could lecture at Yale University, absolutely fine. And the white people have to suck that up as if that's fine because there was racism in another direction in the past. So white people can have racism as well. Does that mean that I think that I have a right or other white people have a right to dominate the discourse by talking about their feelings of having been victims of racism? No, not particularly, because what does that get us? It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood.
38:45 Douglas Murray? Am I saying that white people who've experienced violence have experienced historically anything like the violence that was perpetrated against black people in America historically? Obviously not. But, you know, what kind of competition do we want to enter here?
39:02 Douglas Murray? And this is very, very important terrain now in America. Because there's one other thing I have to throw in there, which is how do you work out the sincerity of the claim? How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made? At one point in my, in this latest book, I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche on the Genealogy of Morals, where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated carefully. You know, when people say, I love Nietzsche, you have to, which bits?
39:36 Douglas Murray? What exactly do you love about him? But he, and a lot can be learned from the answer. But there are moments in the Genealogy of Morals that were very useful for this book. One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase that I've now stolen for myself, appropriated, you might say, where, where he refers to people who, who tear at wounds long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel.
40:09 Douglas Murray? Now, how do you know, how do you know whether the pain is real? How do you know? I'm not saying you can never know, but it's hard. So when somebody says, I feel that my life hasn't gone that well, and it's because of something that was done to my ancestors 200 years ago. Maybe they do feel that. Maybe they're right to feel that. Maybe they're making it up. Maybe they're using it as their reason for failure in life. Maybe they're using it as their reason to not even try. Maybe they're using it as their reason to smoke weed all day. I don't know. And who does know? How can you work that out?
40:50 Douglas Murray? And that's why I come back to this thing of who are we to constantly judge in this society, other people who we don't know, and attribute motives to them based on racial or other characteristics?
41:04 Lex Fridman? And as you write in this part, I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche, and at the same time cancelling Nietzsche in the same set of sentences. But you write in this part about evil.
41:21 Douglas Murray? No, I didn't cancel Nietzsche. I can't cancel Nietzsche. I was saying, I was saying, treat him carefully.
41:28 Lex Fridman? Treat him carefully, fair enough. But you can judge a man's character by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes.
41:36 Douglas Murray? Fair enough. I think when you meet people who do Man and Superman a bit too much.
41:41 Lex Fridman? Now, you're pulling in even deeper water, referencing Hitler here. Okay. So you write in this part of the book about evil. Quote, "What is it that drives evil? Many things without doubt, but one of them is identified by several of the great philosophers is resentment. That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy, colon, blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserve more." And you're saying this kind of resentment, we don't know, as it surfaces, whether it's
42:22 Lex Fridman? genuine, or if it's used to sort of play games of power to evil ends.
42:31 Lex Fridman? Can you speak to this, to this, this, because it's such a fascinating idea that one of the biggest drivers of evil in the world is resentment. Because if you look at, boy, if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler, so much of the propaganda, so much of the narrative was about resentment. So is that surface or is it level or is that deep? The resentment that drives it?
42:58 Douglas Murray? It can be any of the above. First of all, everybody has resentment. I use the term resentment, which is thought very similar to resentment. Let's stick with resentment. So we don't sound too pretentious. The, let me give you a quick example of somebody in our own day who has, who has a form of resentment. Vladimir Putin. Did you see Navalny's documentary Putin's Palace?
43:29 Lex Fridman? Yes.
43:29 Douglas Murray? Yeah. You remember the stuff about Putin as a young KGB officer in Germany? And the stuff about Putin and his first wife's resentment of one of his KGB colleagues who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger than the Putin's apartment?
43:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
43:46 Douglas Murray? It's very interesting. And by the way, I'm not saying that, you know, Vladimir Putin became the man he has become and invaded Ukraine because he didn't have an apartment he liked in Berlin or Munich, wherever he was.
43:56 Lex Fridman? But it's a distinct possibility.
43:57 Douglas Murray? My, my point is, is that resentment is a factor in all human lives and we all feel it in, in our lives and it's, it's something that has to be struggled against. Resentment is, in political terms, can be a deadly, I mean, it's an incredibly deep thing to draw upon. I mean, you mentioned Hitler. Obviously, one of the things that Hitler played on was resentment, obviously. Almost every revolutionary does. I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well. And we're not without cause. There's a good reason to feel that Versailles was not listening to Paris in the seventeen eighties
44:39 Douglas Murray? and feel resentment for Marie Antoinette in her palace within the palace, ignoring the bread shortages in Paris.
44:50 Douglas Murray? So resentment is a very, it's a very understandable thing and sometimes it's justifiable. And it's also deadly to the person as it is to the society. It's an incredibly deep, deep sentiment. Somebody else has got something that you should have. And the, the problem about it is that it's, it has the potential to be endless. You can do it your whole life. And one of the ways I've, I've sort of, sort of found myself explaining this to people is to say, it's also important to recognize that resentment is something that can cross absolutely every boundary. So for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously, and I goes without saying.
45:32 Douglas Murray? More interesting is it crosses all class boundaries and socioeconomic boundaries. And if I was to sort of simplify this thought, I would say, I guess that you and I and everybody watching knows or has known somebody in their lives who has almost nothing in worldly terms and is a generous person, a kindly person, a giving person, a happy person even, a cheerful person.
46:05 Douglas Murray? And I think we probably have also, or many of us would have met people who seem to have everything and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment. Somebody else has held them back from something, their sister once did something, they said, she shouldn't, she got this and I should have got that. And, and on and on and on. It's a human trait. And what, one of the things that suggests to me is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this. This is something which we can do something about, not limitlessly. But for instance, I mean, there are very good reasons that some people in their lives might feel resentment. Let's say you're involved in a car crash and a friend fell asleep at the wheel and that's why you are
46:50 Douglas Murray? spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair. That's a pertinent example of this in American politics at the moment.
46:57 Douglas Murray? You would be justified in feeling resentment. And at some point, you have to make a decision, which is, am I going to be that person? Or a different person?
47:10 Lex Fridman? But even in that case, you're saying at the individual level and that societal level is destructive to the mind, even when you're quote unquote justified.
47:17 Douglas Murray? It rots you. It rots you because the best you can do is to eke out your days unfulfilled.
47:28 Lex Fridman? So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude.
47:31 Douglas Murray? Yes.
47:32 Lex Fridman? Gratitude is the antidote to evil, in a sense. So gratitude is the individual level and the societal level.
47:40 Douglas Murray? Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment. I quote in The Wall in the West, but when I read it the first time a few years ago, I was absolutely floored by the Brothers Karamazov. Not everything in it, by the way, and I won't get into it, but I have some very big structural criticisms of the novel.
48:01 Lex Fridman? Now you're just sweet talking to me because I'm a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this.
48:06 Douglas Murray? Oh, okay. Well, we could get into what I see as big structural flaws in The Brothers Karamazov. Anyway.
48:11 Lex Fridman? Now I'm offended and triggered.
48:14 Douglas Murray? Yeah, no, I mean, this is coming out of Macbeth and saying, I didn't think it was much good.
48:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there's structural flaws.
48:22 Douglas Murray? Yeah, I thought the ending stank.
48:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
48:25 Douglas Murray? Middle wasn't very good. No. When I read that novel, I was floored by a couple of things. One is, of course, at the moment where we realize the devil appears. The moment that Ivan says to his brother, you know, he visits me, and you realize that he's talking about the devil, the whole novel goes into this totally different space. And it's even more than you've already realized the novel's about. And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan and the devil, remember, I think he describes him as dressed as a French, dressed in the French style. Of the early part of the 90th century.
49:07 Douglas Murray? Very strange, the devil will be dressed like that, but sort of. And if you remember, and he's sort of cross-legged and rather a Bane figure. But the devil mentions in passing to Ivan that, he says, I don't know why gratitude is not an instinct that's been given to me.
49:31 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you're not allowed, this is not, given the role of being the devil, this is not one of the things.
49:39 Douglas Murray? Just not one of the things. And you think, and of course, only a genius of Dostoevsky's stature could, I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel out of that insight. Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away because there's such an abundance of riches that he still has to get through. Structural problems aside, but the.
50:00 Lex Fridman? The passive aggressive, the microaggression in this conversation is palpable.
50:07 Douglas Murray? Little knife fight. No, but the reason I mention this because of course, when I saw this, I thought, this is such a brilliant insight by Dostoevsky because why would gratitude not be a sentiment the devil was capable of? The answer is of course that if the devil was capable of gratitude, he wouldn't be the devil. He'd be somebody else. He has to be incapable of gratitude.
50:33 Lex Fridman? Do you think for Dostoevsky that was as strong of an insight as it is for you? Because I think that's a really powerful idea that with gratitude, you don't get the resentment that rots you from the core.
50:47 Douglas Murray? Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things that he saw in us. And the way I put it is that, I mean, I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction, which is one of the things I'd like us to call the era that's now ending.
51:04 Douglas Murray? The era of deconstruction was the era that started, let's say, from the 60s onwards, and was originally an academic game that then spilled out into the wider culture, which was, let's take everything apart, let's pull it all apart. And there are lots of problems with it. One is it's quite boring. You don't get an awful lot from it. You also have the problem of what children find when they try to do this with bicycles, which is they can take it apart quite easily, but they can't put it back together. And the era of taking things apart as a game is one we've lived through, and it's been highly destructive.
51:49 Douglas Murray? But you can do it for quite a long time. I'm going to look at this society and I'm going to take it apart by showing systemic problems. I'm going to... At the end of that, what have you got? What have you done? What have you achieved? We need to interrogate this. Okay, interrogate, by all means, ask questions, but interrogate has a deliberate hostility to this. I'm going to interrogate this thing and take it apart. And again, at the end of it, what have you got? Whether you're interrogating a text, or a piece of music, or an idea, or a society, fine, question, endlessly question. Yes, interrogate?
52:30 Douglas Murray? Assumes it's all criminal in a cell, and it's guilty, and therefore it must be taken apart. And that's what we've been doing for decades in the West. And that's resentment. That's one byproduct of resentment. You can't build the thing, but you know how to take it apart.
52:52 Lex Fridman? Is a little bit of resentment good? So you have, you know, that, I love Tom Waits, and he has a song where a little drop of po... I like my Tom with a little drop of poison. Is it good to do that? Is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink?
53:09 Douglas Murray? Depends what the poison is, and it depends if you know not to have another drink.
53:15 Douglas Murray? Well, it might be the case you find out as some alcoholics do that one was too many and ten is not enough.
53:22 Lex Fridman? So there's a natural, in this case, this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope. It becomes an addiction, becomes a drug, and you just can't stop.
53:32 Douglas Murray? Well, you'd have to wean yourself off it and try to start creating again. You'd have to start trying to put things together again.
53:42 Douglas Murray? Something I think might be in the throes of starting as it happens.
53:48 Lex Fridman? Well, speaking of taking things apart and not putting them together again, the idea of critical race theory.
53:59 Lex Fridman? Can you, to me, explain? So I'm an engineer and have not been actually paying attention much, unfortunately, to these.
54:09 Douglas Murray? None of the people in your field were until it comes along and smacks you in the face.
54:12 Lex Fridman? I, you know, I've had that line of thinking, you know, from MIT. I said, well, surely whatever you folks are busy about yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale. It's not going to.
54:28 Douglas Murray? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. People in the STEM subjects thought, it's not coming for us. It can't come to us and bang.
54:35 Lex Fridman? Well, it's, you know, it hasn't quite been a bang.
54:38 Douglas Murray? Engineering is more safe than others.
54:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So not, so let's draw a line now between engineering and science. So I think engineering is, I'm sitting in a castle in the tallest tower with my pinky out drinking my martini saying, surely the peasants below with their biology and their humanities will figure it all out. No, I'm just kidding. There's no, there's no pinky out. I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants. Okay, where's this? This metaphor has gone too far. Can you explain to this engineer what critical race theory is? Is it a term that's definable? Is there a tradition? Is there a history? What is good about it? What is bad about it?
55:25 Douglas Murray? It is a tradition. It is a history. It's a school of thought. It started in the law roughly in the 1970s in some of the American academy. It spilled out. It always aimed to be an activist philosophy. People deny that now, but as I cite in The War on the West and the foundational texts say as much. This is an activist academic study. We're not just looking at the law. We seek to change the law. And it's spilled out into all of the other disciplines. I think there's a reason for that, by the way, which is it happened at the time that the humanities and others in America were increasingly weak and didn't know what to do. And they needed more games to play or new games to play.
56:09 Lex Fridman? The psychologists got bored.
56:11 Douglas Murray? Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure. They needed something to do. And I mean, it's not an original observation. Plenty of people have made this, but Neil Ferguson said this some time ago, for instance, that in the last 50 years in American academia, certainly in humanities departments, when somebody dies out who's a great scholar in something, that's just not replaced by somebody of equal stature. They're replaced by somebody who does theory or critical race theory. They're replaced by somebody who does the modern games. Somebody dies out who's a great historian of, say, I don't know, it's one that's on my mind, Russian history or Russian literature. And they're not replaced by a similar scholar.
56:54 Lex Fridman? In his observation and in yours, is this a recent development?
56:59 Douglas Murray? It's happened in the last few decades for sure. And it's sped up.
57:02 Lex Fridman? Is it because we've gotten to the bottom of some of the biggest questions of history?
57:06 Douglas Murray? No, it's because we're willing to forget the big questions.
57:11 Lex Fridman? Because it's more fun to, big questions are s one?
57:13 Douglas Murray? No, partly it's, partly it's, no, I should stress that partly this is in the weeds, but partly it's a result of the hyper specialization in academia. You know, if you said you'd like to write your dissertation on Hobbes.
57:30 Douglas Murray? If you wanted to, if you, something central to Kant's thought, or Hegel, or something, I mean, that's not popular. What's popular is to take somebody way down the line from that, because there's a feeling that that's all been done. So you take something way, way, way down the line from that, that's much less important, and then you sort of play with that. And I think most people, anyone who's watching, who's been in a philosophy department or anything else in recent years, will know that tendency. By the way, there's a very practical consequence of this. I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton's
58:10 Douglas Murray? life, when he would occasionally, he didn't get tenure at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in, even by his enemies, to teach courses in various universities in basics of philosophy, because there was no one in the department able to do it. Like, he would go in and teach for a semester, you know, Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and others, because there was no one to do it, because they were all playing with the things way, way, way down the road from this. So that had already happened, and people were searching for new games to play. And the critical race theory stuff forced its
58:49 Douglas Murray? way in, partly in the way that all of this, that's now known as anti-racism does, which is in a sort of bullying tone, of saying if you don't follow this. The same way that all the things that are called studies, I think everything called studies in humanities should be shut down.
59:08 Lex Fridman? Because of the activist.
59:10 Douglas Murray? It's an act, they're all activism. Gay studies and queer studies, nothing good has ever come from it. Nothing good.
59:19 Lex Fridman? To push back, is it, is it obvious that activism is a sign of a flaw in a discipline? So isn't it?
59:27 Douglas Murray? It's a sign of the death of the discipline. It's a sign that the discipline's over.
59:31 Lex Fridman? But isn't it a good goal to have for a discipline to enact change, positive change on the world? Or is that to is that that's for politicians to do with the findings of of of science?
59:45 Douglas Murray? I mean, not. Why create an ideology and then set out to find disciplines that are weakly put together to try to back up your political ideology?
59:55 Lex Fridman? So ideology should not be part of of of science or of.
1:00:00 Douglas Murray? No, I mean, why would you?
1:00:04 Douglas Murray? I mean, I mean, anyone could do it. You could decide to go in and be wildly right wing about something and only do things that prove your right wing ideas, be fantastically anti academic, fantastically anti-science. It's an absurd way to to mix up activism and and and academia. And it's absolutely rife and critical race theory is one of the ones that completely polluted the academy.
1:00:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and there's been dark moments throughout history, both for during World War Two with both communism and Nazism fascism that infiltrated science and then corrupted it.
1:00:47 Douglas Murray? Yes, I mean, for instance, also, let's face it, in science, as in everything else, there are dark, difficult things. It's much better we know about them, face up to them and try to find a way socially to deal with them than that you leave them in the hands of some activist who wants to do stuff with them.
1:01:06 Lex Fridman? Some of my best friends are activists. I'm just kidding, okay?
1:01:10 Douglas Murray? None of my best friends are activists. That's how it should be.
1:01:15 Lex Fridman? Well, I was kidding because I don't have any friends, but okay. Now, I'm trying to get gain some pity points. Okay, so to return.
1:01:26 Douglas Murray? You have your clubhouse friends. Screaming away like deranged maniacs. No, I'm anti clubhouse by the way, because the only time I heard it was that Brett Weinstein one when he did that. I don't know if you heard that early in clubhouse. I was invited to clubhouse by various people. He was, oh, this is a really great civilized way to hang out and talk with interesting people. I downloaded the app and I got on one night because Brett Weinstein said, um, you know, I'm doing this conversation and I listened and it was the maddest damn discussion I've ever heard.
1:01:55 Lex Fridman? Was it something about biology, something about, was it during covid times?
1:02:00 Douglas Murray? At some point Brett said, I'm an, um, I'm an evolutionary biologist. And somebody else started saying, you're a eugenicist. And he said, no, I'm an evolutionary biologist. And somebody was like, that's the same thing. And it just went on like that. And Brett desperately tried to explain that's not the same thing as being a eugenicist. And he lost the clubhouse room. They thought that was the same thing. He'd come, it horribly reminded me of a time some years ago when a British newspaper ran a sort of, realizing that the only thing you can unite people on in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia.
1:02:39 Douglas Murray? Ran an anti-pedo campaign and shortly after pediatricians offices were torched in the north of England by a mob who hadn't read the whole sign.
1:02:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah, well, to me, um, like I said, a little bit of poison is good for the town. So.
1:02:57 Douglas Murray? Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you with flattering you with that people on clubhouse.
1:03:00 Lex Fridman? I have many, I have, I have multiples of friends, yes.
1:03:07 Lex Fridman? What, we didn't get to some of the ideas of critical race theory. What, what exactly is it? I'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.
1:03:16 Douglas Murray? Yeah, it's, it's an attempt to look at everything, among other things, through the lens of race. And to add race into things where it may not be as a way of adding, I'm, I'm trying to give the most generous estimation, to add race in as a conversation in a place where it may not have been in the conversation.
1:03:38 Lex Fridman? And that means history too, the history of racism.
1:03:42 Douglas Murray? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All history and to look at it through these particular lenses.
1:03:49 Douglas Murray? I mean, there's a certain, like all these things, there's a certain logic in it like, like with feminist studies or something. I mean, is there a utility in looking back through undoubtedly male dominated histories and asking where the the more silent female voice was? Yes, very interesting, not endlessly interesting and can't be put exactly on the same par as, but it has a utility.
1:04:18 Lex Fridman? It's that endlessly, sorry to interrupt, that endlessly part that seems to get us into trouble a lot here.
1:04:22 Douglas Murray? Yes, absolutely. Well, because of this thing of where do you stop? And that's, that's, that's always a, I looked, talked about this in my last book, In the Manners of Crowd. It's one of the big conundrums in activist movements and particularly in activist academia. Where would you stop? It's not clear because you've got a job in it. You've got a pension in it. You've got, your only esteem in society is in keeping this gig going.
1:04:54 Douglas Murray? I mean, is there any likelihood? Have you ever, it's the old academic joke, isn't it? That, you know, the end of every conference, the only thing everyone agrees on is that we must have another conference like this one. It's the one thing they always agree on. This conference has been so great, we must have another one.
1:05:11 Lex Fridman? Well, that's a criticism you could apply to a lot of disciplines.
1:05:14 Douglas Murray? Of course.
1:05:14 Lex Fridman? Civil engineering, bridge building. At a certain point, do we need any more bridges? Can we just fly everywhere? You know, so.
1:05:24 Douglas Murray? At the very least, you need to keep the bridges up.
1:05:27 Lex Fridman? Sure. And they would, critical race theory folks would probably make the same argument. At the very least, we need to keep the racism out. We have to make sure we don't descend into the racism.
1:05:39 Douglas Murray? It assumes all the time that we are living on the cusp of the return of the KKK.
1:05:44 Lex Fridman? Right.
1:05:44 Douglas Murray? Which is totally wrong. I mean, it's a massive.
1:05:47 Lex Fridman? You say that now until the KKK armies march in. We don't always, we can't always predict the future.
1:05:54 Douglas Murray? We can't always predict the future. And you, you can always say you should be careful, but. You've also got to be careful of people who've got their timing like totally, totally wrong, or their estimation of society, they're in.
1:06:08 Lex Fridman? You mean like most of society before in the 1930s? When Hitler was, I mean, so many people got Hitler wrong.
1:06:18 Douglas Murray? Sure they did.
1:06:19 Lex Fridman? And so.
1:06:20 Douglas Murray? Most people.
1:06:21 Lex Fridman? So maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there.
1:06:25 Douglas Murray? Well.
1:06:25 Lex Fridman? Beware of the man with the mustache.
1:06:30 Douglas Murray? If only it was that easy.
1:06:33 Lex Fridman? Not always above facial hair.
1:06:34 Douglas Murray? I mean, I always say that, I mean, what?
1:06:37 Lex Fridman? Very often is.
1:06:38 Douglas Murray? These two clean shaven chaps both say, one of the problems of everybody knowing a little bit about Nazism is that they think that they know where evil comes from and that it comes from like a German with a small mustache, getting people to goose step, for instance. And that's not correct. A much better understanding of it is it can come from all number of directions and keep your antennae as good as you can. But once you end up in this society, which I would argue certainly parts of America were in, where you're always in 1938, that's not healthy for a society either.
1:07:19 Douglas Murray? Where, where people are so primed and think they're so well trained because they spent
1:07:26 Douglas Murray? a term in school, learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust, think they're so well trained in Hitler spotting, that they can do it all the time. Look at all these phrases we now have in our societies like dog whistle. You know, as I always say, if you hear the whistle, you're the dog. But people say that's a dog whistle, as if they're highly trained anti Nazis. I mean, you know, there should be some humility in it. We should, we should be careful, we should be wary for sure.
1:07:56 Douglas Murray? And we should also be slightly humble in our inability to to spot everything.
1:08:03 Lex Fridman? If not significantly humble. Right. So if we can.
1:08:12 Lex Fridman? There's something funny, if not dark, about the the activity of Hitler spotting. If I just may take an aside. But so critical race theory, how much racism? What is racism? How much of it is in our world today? If we were thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting. How and trying to steel man the case of if not critical race theory, but people who who look for racism in our world? How much would you say?
1:08:49 Douglas Murray? Well, let's it's a good thing to try to define. I'd say that racism is the the belief that other people are inferior to you. You could say you could see a form where you thought people were superior to you. That could also happen, but more commonly is you see a group of people as being inferior to you simply by dint of the fact that they have a different racial background.
1:09:14 Douglas Murray? And that's sort of the easiest way to define racism.
1:09:22 Douglas Murray? As I say, I mean, there are types of racism, mainly antisemitism, actually, perhaps it's the only one. Which weirdly lies on on a hatred of people who a certain type of person thinks thinks are better than them. And that's a particular peculiarity, one of the peculiarities of antisemitism.
1:09:41 Lex Fridman? Well, antisemitism somehow does both, right?
1:09:44 Douglas Murray? Yes. Well, one of the eternal fascinating things about antisemitism is it can do, it does everything at the same time.
1:09:52 Lex Fridman? It's like a quantum racism.
1:09:54 Douglas Murray? Yes.
1:09:54 Lex Fridman? You're both superior and inferior.
1:09:56 Douglas Murray? You know that you do you know, um, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate? So in the middle of Life and Fate, which a Persian friend of mine said was one of only two great novels of the 20th century, she was a very harsh literary critic. What was the other one? Oh, The Leopard, obviously. The Leopard? The Leopard of Giuseppe D'Ampli, yeah. Okay. She definitely right on that one. Life and Fate is a- I'm learning so much today. Life and Fate is a, is an extraordinary book, mainly about, well, you know Grossman was a, was an Aussie Jewish himself, he, he saw almost everything that he could have
1:10:36 Douglas Murray? done in the Second World War, he saw Stalingrad, a journalist, and he, he wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad. He was also the first journalist into Trab blinker. And his account, which you can read in one of the collections of his journalism, his account of walking into Trab blinker is just one of the most devastating, haunting pieces of journalism or prose you can read. Anyhow, I mention him because Grossman at the, in the middle of Life and Fate, which is about a 900 page novel, in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis around Stalingrad.
1:11:13 Douglas Murray? He, at one point, amazingly, he sort of goes into the minds of both Hitler and Stalin. He says, he says Stalin, in his study, feels his counterpart in Berlin, and he says he feels very close to him at this moment.
1:11:28 Douglas Murray? Wow, around Stalingrad, like, leading up to the bad- After Stalingrad, when the Germans have lost, he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.
1:11:37 Douglas Murray? But Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fate, slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century, suddenly dedicates a chapter to antisemitism. And I've seen antisemitism as something I've always been very interested in, because I've always had the instinctive utter revulsion of it, and also partly because of having seen bits of it. In the Middle East and elsewhere, but I mention this because Grossman in the middle of Life and Fate has it takes time out and does this like three-page explanation, three-page description of antisemitism. And it's extraordinary. I mean, it's the only
1:12:17 Douglas Murray? thing I can think of that's equally good is Gregor von Redtore, who wrote a luridly titled but brilliant set of novels called Confessions of an Antisemite, about pre First World War antisemitism in Eastern and Central Europe. Anyway, Grossman says in the middle of Life and Fate, that one of the extraordinary things about antisemitism is that he does everything at the same time. Those Jews get condemned in one place for being rich and in another for being poor. Condemned in one place for assimilating
1:12:56 Douglas Murray? and another for not assimilating. For assimilating too much and assimilating too little. For being too successful, for not being successful enough. So it's, I think it's the only racism that includes within it a detestation, for the real antisemite, a detestation of people that the person may perceive to be better than them, correctly or otherwise.
1:13:22 Lex Fridman? By the way, I'm embarrassed to say I have not read this one of two greatest novels of the 20th century, Life and Fate, Żизня судьба. And just to read off of Wikipedia, we see Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper Krasna Zvizda. Having volunteered and been rejected from military service, he spent a thousand days in the front lines, roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and the Soviets. And the main themes covered in, how's it go, Life and Fate, I keep thinking Żизня судьба, is a theme on Jewish identity and the Holocaust, Grossman's idea of humanity and the human goodness, Stalin's distortion of reality and values.
1:14:06 Lex Fridman? And science like goes on in reality of war is interesting. I need to definitely.
1:14:11 Douglas Murray? You need to read it. I think you'll really get a lot from it. It's one of the other things. So it's one reference, but one of the other things he does is that he he has this extraordinary ability to to talk about the the other, the absolute highest levels of the conflict. And then zoom in, it's rather like the camera work they use in things like Lord of the Rings, where he zooms down, then gets one person in the midst of all this and you get you you get on there.
1:14:34 Lex Fridman? Or puts you in the study too. So I I personally have read and reread the William Shire's The Rise and Fall of the Reich, who's another journalist who was there.
1:14:44 Douglas Murray? Hmm.
1:14:45 Lex Fridman? Uh, but he does not do it. Interestingly enough, given such a large novel, kind of the definitive work on Hitler, definitive original work that goes to source materials on on Hitler, he doesn't uh touch antisemitism really.
1:15:01 Douglas Murray? Hmm. Big thing to miss out.
1:15:04 Lex Fridman? Well, he just says it very calmly and objectively as he does for most of the work that this was the fact of life. There's a lot of cruelty throughout, but he doesn't get to.
1:15:17 Douglas Murray? Well, one of the things is, of course, they lost the war because of antisemitism. I mean, that's one kind of important way to to view it. And Robert, another historian, says is that, you know, in the end, the Nazis lost the war because they were Nazis.
1:15:31 Douglas Murray? It it sounds almost too neat, but it's it's it's worth remembering that, you know,
1:15:36 Douglas Murray? at the end of the war, when the Germans need to be transporting troops and they need to be transporting very basic supplies, Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains to transport the Jews right up to the end.
1:15:50 Lex Fridman? Well, that's that's certainly a dark, dark possibility.
1:15:54 Douglas Murray? You know, anyhow, but but to go back to racism in general, racism in general, apart from antisemitism relies on the the um perception that another group of people, a racial group other than your own are inferior to you. That's what I'd say is the easiest shorthand of racism. And of course, it's one of the stupidest things that our species is capable of. I mean, one of the stupidest, that you can look at a person and guess them.
1:16:26 Douglas Murray? In their entirety, in fact, because of their skin color. I mean, it's like, what a stupid idea that is, as well as being an evil one. But the, the, I would say that one of the, I think it's a dangerous thing in our era that there are bits of it coming back. That's why I say we do need sort of, we need our antennae working. We just don't need them to be overactive or underactive, you know?
1:16:54 Lex Fridman? Now, the book is War in the West, but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups based on their skin color, you've said that there's a war on white people in the US. Would you say that's the case? Would you say that there is significant racism towards white people in the United States?
1:17:15 Douglas Murray? I'd say that, that white people in the United States are the only people who are told that they have hereditary sin. That's a big one, just to start with.
1:17:24 Lex Fridman? Based strictly on their skin color?
1:17:27 Douglas Murray? I mean, I would find it so repugnant if, and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this, I would feel so repugnant if there were any school of thought in America today that had any grasp on the public attention, that said that black people were born into evil because of something their ancestors had done. Like they had the mark of Cain upon them. I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way to try to demoralize a group of people and to tell them that the, the things they would be able to achieve in their lives are much lessened because they should spend significant portions of their lives
1:18:12 Douglas Murray? trying to atone for something they didn't do.
1:18:15 Lex Fridman? Is there a difference?
1:18:18 Douglas Murray? And the brilliant following point, the obvious point left un said, but let's say it. Nobody in the public square says that, and they're the maniacs at the far fringes, but nobody in the mainstream would dare to say that, or I think even think that about any group of people other than white people. And does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged than black people? No. And again, let's not make this a competition, but let's not get into, I just desperately urge people not to get into the idea of hereditary sin according to racial background.
1:18:55 Lex Fridman? Is there something to be said about the feature aspect to sort of play devil's advocate about the asymmetry of sort of accusations towards the majority?
1:19:08 Douglas Murray? Yes.
1:19:08 Lex Fridman? Because white.
1:19:09 Douglas Murray? Much easier to attack a majority.
1:19:11 Lex Fridman? It is much easier, but is there something to be said about that being a useful function of society that you always attack?
1:19:19 Lex Fridman? That the minority has disproportionate power to attack the majority so that you can always keep the majority in check?
1:19:26 Douglas Murray? Well, it's a dangerous game to play, isn't it?
1:19:29 Lex Fridman? I think.
1:19:30 Douglas Murray? It's a very dangerous game to play.
1:19:32 Lex Fridman? That's a good summary of entirety of human civilization.
1:19:35 Douglas Murray? Well, yeah, everything is dangerous. But it's a very dangerous game to play that. I wrote about this bit in the matters of crowds when I was saying like gay rights people, the ones that still exist, the ones who don't have homes to go to, who want to beat up on straight people in a way, or want to make straight people feel like they're kind of unremarkable, uncool, you know, boring straights. So boring. So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gays.
1:20:09 Douglas Murray? That's a bad idea to push that one. That's a bad idea. And some gays push that.
1:20:17 Douglas Murray? Highly unwise, given the fact that about two to three percent of the population are actually gay, although now there's like an additional twenty percent who think they're like two-spirit or something and all that bullshit, but they're just attention seekers. So let's not spend too much time on that. But equally, as I've said, I said the man is a coward with with the feminist movement, very unwise for half of the species to say that the other half of the species isn't needed. And there were always third and fourth way feminists willing to make that nuts argument. Not first way feminists, you didn't hear the first way feminists, you didn't hear suffragettes
1:20:59 Douglas Murray? tended not to say, we like the vote and men are scum. It would have been hard to have won everyone over their side, not least the men they needed to win over their side. But you do get third and fourth way feminists who say like, you know, do we need men? Or men are all X. Again, it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea tactically.
1:21:21 Lex Fridman? What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard, describes that men are the originators of violence, physical violence in society? And he argues that actually the world would be better off. No, just a very cold calculus. If you get rid of men, there would be a lot less violence in society, is his claim.
1:21:46 Douglas Murray? But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?
1:21:48 Lex Fridman? Well, that's, but shouldn't that at least be a discussion?
1:21:51 Douglas Murray? I'm very happy for the discussion.
1:21:53 Lex Fridman? Have a debate on a panel discussion, violence, pros and cons.
1:21:57 Douglas Murray? Well, that's the sort of thing, if I can say so, that some like weak ass academic decides to do because he thinks that his area of Boston would be nicer, whatever. He might decide it's useful if he was living in Kiev today to have violent men.
1:22:15 Douglas Murray? I mean, it might, if, if, if New York was invaded right now, I'd need some violent men around here.
1:22:23 Lex Fridman? But it wouldn't be invaded if there's no violent men.
1:22:27 Douglas Murray? Well.
1:22:27 Lex Fridman? Is the ar- cause the argument.
1:22:29 Douglas Murray? There's, there's also, at least there's some level of threat that you ought to exude that puts people off. If I was in, you know, I'm very glad that the, that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of and more than capable of fighting for their country and for their neighbors and their families and much more, but it's better that, that there was violence ready to unleash when violence was unleashed upon them than that the whole society had been told that they should identify as non-binary.
1:23:04 Lex Fridman? But at least it's, it's a conversation to have, isn't there, uh, is there aspect to the sort of the feminist movement that is correct in, in challenging the?
1:23:18 Douglas Murray? Some forms of violence, domestic violence, for instance, although women are capable of that as well.
1:23:24 Lex Fridman? I'm learning about this.
1:23:26 Douglas Murray? We're always learning about this at the moment.
1:23:28 Lex Fridman? I can't help but watch the entirety of it go down in this beautiful mess that is human relations. Okay.
1:23:33 Douglas Murray? But just to finish up that thought, I mean, it's, it's very unwise for women to war against men, as it would be for men to war against women. It's highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population. And in America, Britain and other Western countries, white people are still a majority. And so why would you tell the majority that they're evil by dint of their skin color? And think that that would be a good way to keep them in check? I mean, I'm not guilty of anything because of my skin color. I'm not guilty of anything. My ancestors didn't do anything wrong. And even if they had, why would I be held responsible for it?
1:24:11 Lex Fridman? So to go back to Nietzsche. Is there some aspect to where if we try to explain the forces at play here? Is it the will to power playing itself out? From individual human nature and from group behavior nature? Is there some elements to this, which is the game we play as human beings? Is always when we have less power, we try to find ways to gain more power?
1:24:38 Douglas Murray? That's certainly one. The desire to to grab is, let me see if I can find a quote for you on that. The desire to grab that which we think we're owed. And to do it often in the guise of justice. I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age and one of the very great bogus terms of our age. People forever talk about their search for justice. It's amazing how violent they can often be in their search for justice and how many rules they're willing to break so long as they can say that they're after justice. And how many norms they can trample so long as they can say it's in the name of justice. You can burn down buildings in the name of justice.
1:25:23 Lex Fridman? Well, the the majority groups throughout history, including those with white skin color, have done the same in the name of justice. We come up with all kinds of sexy terms in our propaganda machines to sell whatever atrocities we'd like to commit.
1:25:38 Douglas Murray? One of the one of the quotes of Nietzsche that I liked, and I quoted in this.
1:25:42 Lex Fridman? Careful, I'm judging you harshly.
1:25:44 Douglas Murray? Yeah, of course.
1:25:48 Douglas Murray? Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment is they'll achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves, to shove their misery in the faces of the happy so that in due course, the happy, and this is quoting Nietzsche, start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another, it's a disgrace to be happy. There is too much misery. This is something to be averted for the sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too, or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick. Well, I think there again, there's a lot of that going on. How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world? Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy?
1:26:32 Lex Fridman? I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well.
1:26:35 Douglas Murray? Sure.
1:26:36 Lex Fridman? Notes from underground. Okay.
1:26:41 Douglas Murray? This has been very Russian, Russian focused. I'm very pleased with the number of times, but Dostoevsky, Grossman and others have come in. This is very, I wasn't doing this as a sort of.
1:26:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah, well, it's always good to plug the greats. And good to know they're still relevant. Do you speak Russian, by the way, at all?
1:27:01 Douglas Murray? Which I did. I'm told it's a 10 year language, basically, to learn from scratch, as my friends who have done it.
1:27:07 Lex Fridman? Well, there's the language and then there's the personality behind the language and the personality, I feel like you already have. So you just need to know the surface details. Okay. In fact, the silence, to be silent in the Russian language is something that's already important.
1:27:26 Douglas Murray? Oh, I should, if we had a moment, I'd tell you my story about Stalin's birthplace. Did I tell you that?
1:27:30 Lex Fridman? No.
1:27:31 Douglas Murray? I once went to Gori, where Stalin was born. Have you been?
1:27:35 Lex Fridman? No.
1:27:35 Douglas Murray? I was there just after the Georgia war. And I went to the no man's land in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And I said, I've really got to go to Gori also here, because a shell had landed in Gori, rather weirdly, from the Russian side. And Gori is where Stalin was born. And of course, Gori is in Georgia. And anyhow, the Museum of Stalin's Birthplace, they've been trying to change for some years, because it's been unadulteratedly pro-Stalin for years. And the Georgian authorities, this is in Jagishvili's time, were trying to make it into a museum of Stalinism. And it was really tough.
1:28:19 Douglas Murray? The only place I've seen which is similar is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky was killed. That also is like, they're not quite sure what to do. They, they don't want to say he's a bad guy, because they think that people won't come. Anyhow, Stalin's house in Gori had changed from the Museum of Stalin to Museum of Stalinism. And there was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil, who'd just clearly been doing the tour for like 50 years. And just point to all the facts. She did that classic thing. I also saw it once in North Korea where they that sort of communist thing where they say, here is, this is a hundred and forty seven feet high by thirteen feet deep. It like give you lots of facts. I don't care. What does it matter?
1:28:58 Douglas Murray? They always give you facts. This is Stalin's suitcase. It is thirteen inches wide by, you know, this isn't. Anyhow, and this woman did all of this and it was all just wildly pro, well, not pro Stalin, just explaining Stalin's life. It was just a great local boy done good. They didn't mention the fact he killed more Georgians, but gabbed than anyone else.
1:29:18 Lex Fridman? Local boy done good.
1:29:20 Douglas Murray? And we get, get to the end and before being taken to the gift shop where they sell red wine with Stalin's face on it and among other things. And a lighter with Stalin on it.
1:29:33 Douglas Murray? They, they took you to a little room under the stairs and they said, this is a replica of interrogation cell to show
1:29:43 Douglas Murray? represent horror of what happened in Stalin time. Now gift shop. And so there's no, no kind of thing. And I, I took the woman aside at the, at the end. I saw what she'd said this to other journalists and visited before. I took her aside and said, I said, what, what do you think about communist Stalin? And she said, as I say, she'd obviously done this during communist times. She said, it's not my, not my place to judge, you know, sort of thing. Well, he was an interesting commentator. I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone, you know, and all that sort of thing. And she, it's not my place to judge or to give my views and that sort of thing. And the ventriloquist said, but what do you feel about it?
1:30:24 Douglas Murray? And she said, it was like a hurricane. It happened.
1:30:31 Lex Fridman? That's interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse once again, I got in a chance to talk to a few people from Mongolia. There's a woman from Mongolia and they talked about the fact that they deeply admire Stalin, love. She, she sounded, if I may, hopefully that's not crossing line. I think I'm representing her correctly in saying she admired him almost like,
1:30:55 Lex Fridman? like loved him, like the people, the way people love, like, like, like Jesus, like a holy figure.
1:31:01 Douglas Murray? Well, isn't that still the case in large parts of Russia?
1:31:04 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:31:04 Douglas Murray? I mean, he keeps on, Stalin keeps on winning greatest Russian of all time.
1:31:09 Lex Fridman? And and that's perhaps maybe there's a dip. But if we were to think about the long arc of history, perhaps that's going to go up and up and up and up is.
1:31:17 Douglas Murray? Yeah.
1:31:18 Lex Fridman? There's something about human memory that it just you forget the details of the atrocities of the past and remember the.
1:31:24 Douglas Murray? I mean, think of the number of people we talk about as historical heroes. Napoleon. I mean, British people don't talk about Napoleon as a hero, but the French.
1:31:34 Lex Fridman? It's a country.
1:31:35 Douglas Murray? Now you're.
1:31:36 Lex Fridman? You didn't think that the Stoyevsky now again.
1:31:38 Douglas Murray? Now you're on tricky ground. But no, but like the the the French, enormously, Napoleon, and there had many Admiral Aspits. He was also an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily. And there are lots of figures from history that we sort of cover that over with.
1:31:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah. Can we mention Churchill briefly?
1:32:02 Douglas Murray? Sure.
1:32:02 Lex Fridman? Because he is one of the.
1:32:06 Lex Fridman? You can make a case for him being one of the great representatives or great figures historically of the Western civilization.
1:32:13 Douglas Murray? Yes.
1:32:14 Lex Fridman? And then there's a lot of people from, not a lot. I know I have like three friends and one of one of them happens to be from London and they they say that he's a a not a good person.
1:32:28 Douglas Murray? Why?
1:32:29 Lex Fridman? So, listen, this friend, we did not discuss. I just, this is an opinion poll of the three friends, but I do know that there's quite a you know.
1:32:37 Douglas Murray? There's a backlash going on at the moment.
1:32:38 Lex Fridman? At the moment and in general, there's a spirit like reflecting on on the darker sides of some of these historical figures, like challenging history through. It's it's not just critical race theory. It's it's it's challenging history through, well, are the people we think of as heroes, what are their flaws? And are they in fact villains that are convenient?
1:33:06 Lex Fridman? Sort of were there at the right time?
1:33:11 Lex Fridman? To accidentally do the right thing.
1:33:13 Douglas Murray? Accidentally.
1:33:16 Douglas Murray? I hope this isn't the representative fair summation of your friend in London's view.
1:33:23 Lex Fridman? No, she's going to be quite mad at this, but I didn't say the name, so it could be any friend. It could be.
1:33:28 Douglas Murray? But we know it's a she.
1:33:29 Lex Fridman? Canada. Well, see, I.
1:33:32 Douglas Murray? You've given that away.
1:33:33 Lex Fridman? Well, that's with, of course, I would not, I made that up completely. It's, it's all just like my girlfriend in Canada. She's completely a figment of my imagination. Nevertheless, Winston Churchill is somebody, I mean, just looking at, reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is an incredible figure that, that to me, so much of World War Two is marked, leading up to the war is marked by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders.
1:34:04 Douglas Murray? Yes.
1:34:05 Lex Fridman? And it's fascinating to watch here, this person clearly with a drinking and a smoking problem.
1:34:13 Douglas Murray? Was I didn't understand why that's a negative.
1:34:15 Lex Fridman? No, I didn't say, you see.
1:34:17 Douglas Murray? Yeah, you throw it in as if it is.
1:34:19 Lex Fridman? No, well, it's, it's called humor. I'll explain it to you one day what that means, but he stood.
1:34:24 Douglas Murray? Explain dry humor.
1:34:27 Lex Fridman? He stood up. He, he, he stood up to what we now see as evil, when at the time it was not so obvious to see.
1:34:38 Lex Fridman? You know, so that, that's, that's just a fascinating figure of Western civilization. I'd love to get your comments.
1:34:43 Douglas Murray? The real criticisms, I mean, smoking and drinking. The real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up, and I do so in the war in the West. Actually, I say, these are the things that they now use against him. Didn't do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943, for instance. That's, that's been shot down by numerous historians, including Indian historians. In the middle of the war, in the middle of a world war, Churchill did what he could to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to, into, to Bengal.
1:35:14 Douglas Murray? The famine was appalling. It was caused by a typhoon. It was not caused by Winston Churchill. And the idea that some. Basically, Indian nationalist historians have pumped out in recent years and just anti Churchill figures that he actually wanted Indians to die as is just total calumny. And when people claim, some people claim that, I mean, there was a few very ignorant scholars, nevertheless with some credentials, who claimed that Churchill wanted the Indian population to like basically be genocided. And it's it's complete nonsense, not least by the fact that during the period which in question, Indian population boomed.
1:35:57 Douglas Murray? So that that's one of the main ones. Another one is that he had some views that we now regard as racist. He definitely regarded races as being of different characters and that there were superior races and the, as it were, the white European was a superior culture.
1:36:21 Douglas Murray? He was born in Victorian England, so he had some Victorian attitudes.
1:36:27 Douglas Murray? These are things in the negative side of the ledger. And as with all history, you should have a negative and a positive side of the ledger. Positive side of the ledger includes he almost certainly did more than any one human being to save the world from Nazism. So that should count as something. And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill in this regard is to is to stress that if you get, I'm not trying to stop anyone doing history at all. I don't think the revisionism of recent years about Churchill or the founding fathers of America or anyone else is anything I want to stop. I find it interesting, find it interesting, not least because it's so sloppy on occasions. But I find it interesting and it's important and we should be able to see people in the round. But that includes recognizing the positive side of the ledger.
1:37:12 Douglas Murray? And if you can't recognize that side, you're doing something else. You're doing something else. It's not history. It's some form of politicking of a very particular kind. And I think it's the same thing with the founding fathers. There are some people, for instance, certainly since the nineties, who have pushed the Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson story to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute. As a result, you know, we see Jefferson's statue being removed from the council chamber of the city we're sitting in last November by council members who said that Thomas Jefferson no longer represents our values. If you can't, if you can't recognize greatness of Thomas Jefferson and that he had flaws.
1:37:55 Douglas Murray? I mean, that's not a grown up debate.
1:38:00 Lex Fridman? And weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time. But let me sort of throw a curve ball, a curve ball at you then. What about recognizing the positive and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair called Karl Marx?
1:38:14 Douglas Murray? Sure, sure. I mean, I, I, I have a section in the Wall in the West, as you know, where I go for Karl Marx with some glee.
1:38:24 Lex Fridman? So he seems to have gotten, you know, some popularity in, in the West recently.
1:38:30 Douglas Murray? Not just recently, yeah. I mean, he's, he's had a resurgence recently.
1:38:34 Lex Fridman? Yes, resurgence.
1:38:35 Douglas Murray? Well, that's because, that's because whenever, whenever things are seen to go wrong, people reach for other options. And when, for instance, it's very hard for people to accumulate capital, it's not obvious that they're going to become capitalists. And so one thing that happens is people say, let's look at the Marxism thing again, see if that's a viable goer. And my argument would simply be, point me to one place that's worked.
1:39:00 Lex Fridman? Well, the argument from the Marxist or the Marxian economists is that we've only really tried it once, the Soviets tried it. And then if there's a few people that kind of tried the Soviet thing.
1:39:13 Douglas Murray? Cuba tried it.
1:39:15 Lex Fridman? Well, they, they basically, it's an offshoot of this.
1:39:18 Douglas Murray? Sure.
1:39:18 Lex Fridman? Of Soviet. Yes, they've tried it.
1:39:21 Douglas Murray? They tried it in Venezuela.
1:39:23 Lex Fridman? Yes, yes, yes.
1:39:25 Douglas Murray? So but let's just let's just quickly say, how did all these experiments go?
1:39:29 Lex Fridman? They did not. Well, they failed in fascinating ways.
1:39:32 Douglas Murray? They did, but they failed.
1:39:34 Lex Fridman? Yes, they failed.
1:39:35 Douglas Murray? We should stress, so grossly failed, so grossly failed, that they threw millions and millions of people into completely thwarted lives that were much shorter than they should have been.
1:39:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so the the lesson to learn there, that you can learn several lessons. One is that anything that smells like Marxism is going to lead to a lot of problems. Now, another lesson could be, well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had? He was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism. So is it possible to do better than capitalism? And that's if you take that spirit, you start to wonder, that might actually become relevant in, I don't know, 20, 30, 50 years, when the the the machines start doing more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things, you start to ask questions.
1:40:29 Douglas Murray? Finally, might get to Marx's dream of what the average day would look like.
1:40:33 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:40:35 Douglas Murray? Well, there's going to be an awful lot of literary criticism then.
1:40:40 Douglas Murray? If you remember, that's what Marx said that we would be doing in the evenings, the laborer in the evening.
1:40:44 Lex Fridman? Well, he didn't know Twitter was a thing or Netflix, so he would he would change.
1:40:49 Douglas Murray? Are there things we could learn from Marx plausibly, possibly? I can't think of anything myself offhand, but to have a critique of capitalism isn't by any means a bad thing in the society. I'd rather that it was a critique of capitalism that showed how you improve capitalism, a critique of free market that showed how people could get better better access to the free market, how you could ensure, for instance, that young people get onto the property ladder, things like that. Those are constructive things. So people who say we must have Marxism, I mean, don't know what the hell they're talking about, because that that never leads to any of those things.
1:41:21 Lex Fridman? Haven't led in the past.
1:41:23 Douglas Murray? It's never led in the past. And at some point, you've got to you've got to try to work out how many try how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy before you realize that every attempt always leads to the same thing. I would say, we could pretend that fascism has never been properly tried.
1:41:41 Douglas Murray? And that it was unfortunate what happened in Nazi Germany, but you know, that wasn't real fascism and in Mussolini's fascism, you know, didn't go all that well, but it was, you know, a bit better and maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism. Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they. The people who try that are reviled and quite rightly. So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing? And it's a great mystery to me, the way that people do tolerate it, always, always in this stupid way of saying, we haven't done it yet. If you keep trying the same recipe and every time it comes out as shit, it's that the recipe is shit.
1:42:23 Lex Fridman? Well, sort of, I'm trying to practice here by playing devil's advocate, practice the same idea that you mentioned, which is when you say the word Marxism, should you throw out everything or should you ask a question, is there good ideas here? And the same, it's the good, it's weighing the good and the bad and be able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.
1:42:42 Douglas Murray? Sure. You know, do you know the famous George Orwell comment on Stalin, in an argument with a Stalinist? Do you know? That's one of my favorite quotes. George Orwell, in the early 40s, gets into an argument with a Stalinist, who's obviously Marxist. And the, it is after the show trials, 37, this is, this is when it's very clear what Marxism in the Russian form is. And this Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist and it goes on and on. And eventually Orwell says, well, you know, what about the show
1:43:21 Douglas Murray? trials? And what about what's happened in Ukraine? And, and the famines and much more, and the purges and the purges and the purges. And eventually, the Stalinist says to Orwell, what Orwell knows he's going to say all along, which is, he says, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. And Orwell says, where's the omelet?
1:43:47 Lex Fridman? Oh, yeah.
1:43:49 Douglas Murray? So.
1:43:49 Lex Fridman? That's a good, that's a really good.
1:43:51 Douglas Murray? Look at this by this stage, okay? How many?
1:43:55 Lex Fridman? Where's my damn omelet?
1:43:56 Douglas Murray? Where, how many just messy, big, bloody, eggy piles have the Marxists created by now in country after country?
1:44:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:44:06 Douglas Murray? Always next time they're going to produce the great omelet. But they never have and they never will because the whole thing is rotten from the start. But let me just also say one thing about that because of course Marx isn't as nice as he sounds. And that's one of the things that I I tried to highlight in the book is if we're going to do this reductive thing of people in history and saying, well, they had views that were of their time and we must therefore condemn them for them. So fine, let's do the same thing with Marx. And there are things I quote in this book from Marx's letters, not least the letters to Engels. And indeed, in his published writings, in his piece, he was writing for the American
1:44:44 Douglas Murray? Press in the in 50s, the way he has horrible views on slavery and colonialism and much more. But the main thing is, I mean, the horrible things he says about black people and the constant use of the N word. In fact, when I was doing the audiobook for The Wall and the West, I had to decide, will I read out the quotes from Marx or not? If I had have read them out, I'd have been cancelled because people would have just said, you've been using the N word so much in this passage and you know, this is. And I slightly thought of doing it so that I could say I was only quoting Marx to try to hit the point home. In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to. But Marx's letters are disgusting on these terms.
1:45:29 Douglas Murray? Since I highlighted this in this book and some of the media picked it up and and have popularized this thing I'm trying to put into the system, which is if you're going to accuse Churchill of racism, if you're going to accuse Jefferson of racism, Washington of racism and so on, what about Marx? The two things that Marxists have said since this came out has been, first of all, why are you saying this about Marx? He was a man of his time, like everyone else. And the second thing they say is, we don't go to Marx for his horrible, abhorrent views on race, talking about mixed race people as guerrillas and so on. We don't go to him for that. We go to him for his economic theories. I say, okay, well, we don't go to Thomas Jefferson for his views on slaves.
1:46:15 Douglas Murray? We don't go to Churchill for his, the precise language he used that points in the 1910s about Indians.
1:46:23 Lex Fridman? Or his health advice.
1:46:24 Douglas Murray? Or his health advice. Actually, I do get him for that. But.
1:46:29 Lex Fridman? That explains so much.
1:46:30 Douglas Murray? But let's have some standards on this. And that's why I'm, that's why I'm very suspicious of the fact that the people don't do this with Marx. Because I think what they're trying, what some people are trying to do, and this isn't, this may sound conspiratorial, but I really don't think it is. I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past in order to say, there's nothing good, nothing you can hold on to, no one you should revere, you've got no heroes, the whole thing comes down, who's left standing? Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism, or the 19th and 20th centuries. And, and no, no, you will not have the entire landscape deracinated. And then the worst ideas tried again.
1:47:14 Lex Fridman? So basically destroy all of history and the lessons learned from history and then start from scratch and then, then it's completely, any idea can work and then you could just take whatever.
1:47:24 Douglas Murray? Well, and, and the thing is, there are always some people with pre-prepared ideas. And I mentioned this also with the post-colonialists. The post-colonialists were really interesting. Because when the European powers were moving, were moving from Africa and the Far East, post-colonial movements had one obvious move they could have done, which was to say, since the European powers have left, we will return to a pre-colonial life, which in some of their places would have been returning to slave markets and slave ownership and slave selling and much more. But put that aside for a second. They could have said, we have an indigenous culture which we will return to. Almost uniformly, in the post-colonial era, you had figures like Franz Fanon, you had
1:48:06 Douglas Murray? European intellectuals like Sartre, who said, the Western powers are retreating from these countries and therefore we should institute in these countries what but Western Marxism?
1:48:18 Lex Fridman? Well, it's not obvious to me that like the bad ideas will be the ones that emerge, but it's more likely that the bad ideas would emerge in this kind of context when you erase history, when you erase tradition.
1:48:29 Douglas Murray? When you erase history and you leave some ideas deliberately uninterrogated. I mean, as I say, find me one in a hundred American students who've heard of any of the communist deathpots of the 20th century. I mean, name recognition in, there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK, and like, name recognition among children, schoolchildren for Stalin, let alone Mao. I mean Mao, who kills more people than anyone, 65 million Chinese perhaps.
1:49:11 Douglas Murray? How many students in America know what Mao was, who he was, where he was? Nothing.
1:49:18 Lex Fridman? Or the atrocities committed.
1:49:19 Douglas Murray? Where the atrocities were committed. And I worry about that because it means that we might have learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century. We think we've learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century. We actually haven't learned that lesson. We've learned a little bit of it, and we've not learned the other one at all. Because that's why we still have people in American politics and elsewhere actually talking about collectivization and things, as if there's no problem with that, and as if it's perfectly obvious, and they could run it, and they'd know exactly where to start.
1:49:51 Lex Fridman? What are the two lessons of the 20th century?
1:49:53 Douglas Murray? Fascism and communism.
1:49:54 Lex Fridman? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not exactly sure what the, exactly the lessons are.
1:50:02 Douglas Murray? No, it's not clear. If the lessons were very clear, we'd be better at it.
1:50:06 Lex Fridman? Well, one is your book, Broadly Applied, of madness of crowds. That's one lesson.
1:50:13 Douglas Murray? Well, how so?
1:50:15 Lex Fridman? Meaning like, um, large crowds can display herd-like behavior.
1:50:21 Douglas Murray? Yes, be very suspicious of crowds.
1:50:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah. In general, I mean, you apply it in different, more to modern application, in a sense, but it's, that's rooted in history, that crowds can, when, when humans get together, they can do some quite radically silly things.
1:50:37 Douglas Murray? Elias Kineti is very good on that, crowds and power.
1:50:42 Douglas Murray? And Eric Hoffa, who is a sort of self-taught amazing, not the autodidactic writer, The True Believer and so on, he was extremely good on that. But the reason I mentioned the two things, though, I mean, we should have realized that the two nightmares of the 20th century fascism and communism, that we should know how they came about. And we're interested in learning how one of them came about fascism. And we know some of the lessons, like, don't treat other people as less than you because of their race. That's one lesson. But we've done some good at learning that. But the second one, not to do communism again, not to do socialism, I think we're way away
1:51:27 Douglas Murray? from knowing, because we don't know how it happened. And the little temptations are still there always. Look at people saying, I'm going to exhortate your property. People do things they don't like, they will get, we can't wait to take your property.
1:51:44 Lex Fridman? Well, there's a sense, there's an appealing sense. Okay, every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it that sells the ideology. So for socialism, for communism is that there's a, it seems unfair that the working class does all of this work and gets only a fraction of the output. It just seems unfair. So you want to make-
1:52:09 Douglas Murray? If they do get a fraction of the output, yes.
1:52:11 Lex Fridman? Yes. And so it seems to be more fair if we increase that, if the workers own all of the value of their output. And well, things that are more fair seems to be a good thing.
1:52:28 Douglas Murray? I'd say, well, yeah, I mean fairness is, I like fairness as a term.
1:52:33 Lex Fridman? Like justice.
1:52:34 Douglas Murray? No, I much prefer fairness, because it's a much easier thing to try to work out. It's quite amorphous itself, the concept, but everyone can recognize it. So for instance-
1:52:45 Douglas Murray? Um, should the boss of the company earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee? Doesn't seem fair. Should they earn maybe five or 10 times the salary of the lowest paid employee? Yeah, possibly. That that could be fair. There are certain sort of multiples which are within the bounds of,
1:53:11 Douglas Murray? you know, reasonableness. I I think actually that's the
1:53:17 Douglas Murray? that's the much bigger problem in capitalism at the moment, as I see it, is is the is the not untrue perception that a tiny number of people get a lot of the accrue, a lot of the benefits. And that the
1:53:35 Douglas Murray? the the bit in the middle has become increasingly squeezed and is at danger always of falling all the way down to the bottom. I mean, I think in the snakes and ladders of American capitalism, for instance, it's it's a correct perception to say that the snakes go down awfully far.
1:53:54 Douglas Murray? If you tread on the snake, you can plummet an awfully long way in America. And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high. And there's a perception, and again, it's not entirely wrong, that the ladder system on the board is kind of broken.
1:54:13 Lex Fridman? So what you're saying is you're a Marxist.
1:54:16 Douglas Murray? I'm not saying I'm a Marxist.
1:54:18 Lex Fridman? You heard that here first in the in the out of context blog post you're going to write about this.
1:54:24 Douglas Murray? I get I get back to this point. The way to critique capitalism, if it's gone bad, is to get better capitalists. Free markets where they're not fair should be made fair. Never decide that the answer is the thing that has never produced any human flourishing, i.e. Marxism.
1:54:42 Lex Fridman? So as you describe in The Madness of Crowds, the herd-like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble.
1:54:51 Lex Fridman? You, as an individual thinker and others listening to this, how can you, because all of us are amidst crowds. We're influenced by the society that's around us, by the people that's around us. How can we think independently? How can we? You know, if you're in, um, in the, in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century, if you're in, I don't know, Nazi Germany at the end of 30s or 40s, how can you think independently, um, given, first of all, that it's hard to think independently, just intellectually speaking, but also that there's, it's, it's just, becomes more and
1:55:34 Lex Fridman? more dangerous. So the incentive to think independently under the uncertainty, uh, that's usually involved with thinking is, I mean, it's a silly thing to say, but on Twitter, there is a cost to be paid for.
1:55:47 Douglas Murray? Yes.
1:55:47 Lex Fridman? For going against the crowd on any silly thing. Well, we can even talk about, you know, uh, what is it? Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. You know, there's a crowd that believes that, uh, that was unjustified. I forget what the crowd decided, but I don't.
1:56:03 Douglas Murray? Crowd split on that one. It's safe to have one opinion either way.
1:56:06 Lex Fridman? Okay, it is. Right. But there is this, you, you put it very nicely, that there's clearly a calculus here and that you can measure on Twitter in particular, you can measure kind of the crowd, a sense of where the crowd lays.
1:56:17 Douglas Murray? Michael Jackson.
1:56:21 Lex Fridman? Well, oh, boy. I don't want to, uh, this is not, this is not a legal discussion. I don't have my lawyer present. I don't even have a lawyer.
1:56:30 Douglas Murray? The man in question is dead, but I think most people who are not just diehard fans would concede that Michael Jackson had a strange relationship with children.
1:56:38 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:56:38 Douglas Murray? And, uh, was almost certainly a pedophile.
1:56:43 Lex Fridman? Is that, was that, did, did the crowd agree on that?
1:56:46 Douglas Murray? Uh, no, the crowd hasn't agreed because he's too famous and we all love Thriller.
1:56:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah, we do. So you said people who are not fans, I just don't.
1:56:54 Douglas Murray? No, I'm a fan of Michael Jackson, but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile. And, uh, but I, but nobody wants to give up dancing to Bad at weddings. So, uh, they just kind of add it in. It's fine. Seriously, it's, it's.
1:57:08 Lex Fridman? But see, your, your law does not apply to, uh, Bill Cosby.
1:57:13 Douglas Murray? Oh, that's, well, he wasn't, he, he was, of course, one of the most famous people in America, but maybe he wasn't regarded as talented.
1:57:21 Lex Fridman? Oh, oh, wow. There's, there's depth to this.
1:57:23 Douglas Murray? Oh, yeah. There's a genius opt out in all cultures. There's a genius opt out in all cultures. Look at Lord Byron. Lord Byron shagged his sister.
1:57:33 Douglas Murray? Doesn't affect his reputation. In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it.
1:57:36 Lex Fridman? But then again, this kind of war against the West, genius is actually makes you more likely, or no, to get cancelled. So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson, or
1:57:49 Douglas Murray? Well, yes, because if you haven't done anything remarkable, nobody will come looking for you possibly.
1:57:53 Lex Fridman? Okay.
1:57:53 Douglas Murray? Yeah.
1:57:54 Lex Fridman? Genius can get you trouble eventually. Okay.
1:57:57 Douglas Murray? Sidle through life with nobody noticing, be totally harmless and then and then die and hope you haven't used any carbon.
1:58:07 Douglas Murray? But but you were asking about you were asking about how to survive the the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds. And and there's a very simple answer to that. Don't don't overrate the significance of the unreal world.
1:58:23 Lex Fridman? Oh, come on. But this is still human psychology because you want to fit in. There's a you want to
1:58:29 Douglas Murray? Why?
1:58:30 Lex Fridman? Because you're you like people and you're this is a
1:58:33 Douglas Murray? Why not just like a small number of people and ignore the rest?
1:58:36 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's
1:58:37 Douglas Murray? That's what I do.
1:58:39 Lex Fridman? Well,
1:58:39 Douglas Murray? I mean, I actually like most people. And this isn't a general thing. I don't have detestation for most people at all. Most people I kind of enjoy speaking with and being with. But in terms of storing your sense of self-worth in absolute strangers, big mistake.
1:58:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah, well, me, that's this and this turn into a therapy session because for me, and I think I represent some number of population is I'm pretty self-critical. I'm looking for myself in the world. And there is a depth of connection with people on the Internet. I mean, I have
1:59:13 Douglas Murray? I think there's a shallowness of it.
1:59:15 Lex Fridman? It's shallow connection. Interesting. I
1:59:17 Douglas Murray? Put it this way, if you if you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help?
1:59:22 Lex Fridman? On the Internet? No.
1:59:23 Douglas Murray? No, no. Good. That's a good test.
1:59:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's a good test. But then, at the end of the day, yeah, you're right. Your very close friends would help. Family would help. Yeah.
1:59:32 Douglas Murray? Yep.
1:59:33 Lex Fridman? Perhaps that's the only thing.
1:59:34 Douglas Murray? You can't store you can't store significant amounts of of trust or faith or belief or self-worth in places which will not return it to you.
1:59:48 Lex Fridman? Okay, so let's talk about the more extreme case, the harsher case. When you talk about the things you talk about in the war on the West and madness of crowds. I mean, you're getting a lot of blowback, I'm sure.
2:00:05 Lex Fridman? As for the listener, you just shrugged lightly with a zen-like look on your face. So you don't, all you need is Sam Harris to say that you're brilliant and you're happy.
2:00:19 Douglas Murray? No, I'm very, I love Sam.
2:00:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:00:23 Douglas Murray? I'm deeply pleased when he flatters me, but I mean, and is nice about me, but no, I don't just rely on Sam. No, I mean, I, I don't, why would I mind if, I mean, maybe it's self-selecting. If I didn't have the view I had about that or the, whatever armory it is that I have on that, I wouldn't do what I did, maybe.
2:00:45 Lex Fridman? I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically because of the challenging ideas you explore? So like significant self-doubt, just kind of.
2:00:53 Douglas Murray? I can't say I've been unaffected by, by everything in my life, by any means. That would make me an automaton of some kind.
2:01:02 Douglas Murray? There's definitely times I've got things wrong and regretted that.
2:01:07 Douglas Murray? There's times I've, there have, there was a period around the time I wrote my book, The Strange Death of Europe, which was a very, very dark time. And it wasn't because I was having a dark time in my life, but because of the book I was writing.
2:01:29 Lex Fridman? Oh, because of the places you had to go in order to write.
2:01:32 Douglas Murray? Yeah. And while I was contemplating the end of a civilization, so occasionally now I have maybe slightly too pat at this stage, but sometimes readers come up to me in the street or whatever and say, you know, I love The Strange Death of Europe. And will say, you know, very depressing book to read, however. And I would say, well, you should have tried writing it.
2:01:58 Douglas Murray? But it was because I mean, I was, it was, it's, it has chunks of it, which I'm very proud of in particular about the death of religion, the death of God, the, the, the loss of meaning and the, the void. And that's difficult stuff to write about and to grapple with. And there is a sort of, I haven't reread that book since it came out, but I think there are passages in it which reveal what I was thinking very clearly in the poetry of it, as it were,
2:02:31 Douglas Murray? as well as the, the detail. But yeah, I, I, I can't say, I'm used, I, I'm used to, to saying what I think and what I see. And if there's any pushback I've got from that, I'm completely consoled that I'm saying what I see with my own eyes.
2:02:56 Lex Fridman? That's your source of strength is that you're always seeking the truth as best you see it?
2:03:01 Douglas Murray? Well, I can't agree to go along with a lie if I've seen something with my own eyes.
2:03:08 Lex Fridman? Do you ever, so speaking of Sam Harris, and I mentioned to you offline, a lot of people, I talked to a lot of smart people in my private life on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you as a, as their example of a very smart person. So given that compliment, do you ever worry that your sort of ego grows to a level where you're not, what you think is the truth is no longer the truth? Is this kind of, it blinds you? And also, on top of that, the fact that you stand against the crowd often, that there's part of it that appeals
2:03:53 Lex Fridman? to you, that you like to point out, the emperor has no clothes.
2:03:58 Douglas Murray? I get a certain thrill from the friction.
2:04:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that sometimes both your ego and the thrill of friction.
2:04:06 Lex Fridman? Will get you to deviate from the truth and instead just look for the friction.
2:04:12 Douglas Murray? Could do, could do for sure. I try to keep alive to that. I mean, I try, I mean, early in my career, I realized that, for instance, I didn't want to to make enemies unnecessarily, any more than strictly necessary, because there was a very large number of already necessary enemies. And I remember once, I won't get into the details, but I already had one sort of thing I'd done that we, and then another thing came out. I just thought, I can't, I can't do that. And I remember thinking, don't be the sort of person who's forever creating storms. And I tried to make sure I wasn't. And I think I pretty much stuck to that.
2:04:52 Douglas Murray? But to answer your question, well, the first thing is I'm, I'm as confident I can be that I wouldn't fall into the trap you described. Two reasons. I mean, one is that I don't think of myself as a wildly intelligent person, partly because I'm very, very aware of the things I know nothing about. I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge of the details of finance
2:05:23 Douglas Murray? or economic theory. I mean, the, the real details, I don't mean the, the big picture of the kind that we were just discussing earlier, but I have, if you put the periodic table in front of me, I would struggle to do more than a handful.
2:05:48 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:05:49 Douglas Murray? I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge. And where I have gaps or chasms, I tend to find I have a disproportionate admiration for the people who know that stuff. Like I'm wildly impressed by people who understand money, really understand it. You know, I think, how the hell you do that? Uh, and the same thing with biologists, medics, stuff I just know very little about.
2:06:19 Lex Fridman? And that's a source of humility for you, just knowing that.
2:06:21 Douglas Murray? Yes, I mean, I think, well, I can't get on that stuff, but I mean, Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge. I say that thing, some years ago, there's a thing in the UK called University Challenge. I don't know.
2:06:33 Douglas Murray? And my, I was asked some years ago on to, there's a sort of like celebrity, one of former students of the universities or colleges. Asked to go back for the Christmas special and, and I was asked to be one of the people from my old college to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one. And the only reason I actually wanted to do it was because I discovered that Louis Theroux had been to my college before my time and he was on, he'd agreed to be on the team. And I thought, I'd love to meet Louis Theroux, that'd be great fun. And anyhow, and I said, well, I really don't want to do it. And they said, come on, you'd be great. I said, I wouldn't, I'd show myself up to be a total asshole and ignoramus. And as it was, I sat down in my flat and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.
2:07:16 Douglas Murray? I realized I'd have just sat mute for the whole half hour.
2:07:22 Douglas Murray? I just could not, the first question was about physics and the second one was about, as it was, I watched the, the one and I could answer the first two or three questions. Uh, of the one that actually went out because they, they made it a bit simpler.
2:07:37 Douglas Murray? But, but I mean, I'm terribly conscious of the, and I said to the producers, I said, I can't go on because I mean, I just couldn't answer the questions. These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer a whole range of things. So I'm perfectly aware of my limitations and.
2:07:53 Lex Fridman? You, you contemplate your limitations.
2:07:55 Douglas Murray? Yeah, and they're forever before me, you know, they're not hard to find in every day. And, and then on top of that, I suppose it's, um, you, in a way, you know, that line from Radyard Kipling's.
2:08:10 Douglas Murray? Alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, If.
2:08:15 Douglas Murray? There's a line.
2:08:16 Lex Fridman? You just enjoy a good poem, can you?
2:08:18 Douglas Murray? Well, no, it's not. I can enjoy a great poem.
2:08:22 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:08:22 Douglas Murray? But I mean, a good poem.
2:08:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:08:24 Douglas Murray? This is, you know, slightly off, but.
2:08:28 Lex Fridman? This is, this is, this goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky. Take, take, take, take Douglas's criticism with a grain of salt, so.
2:08:36 Douglas Murray? Maybe I've heard it, read it too many memorial services and things.
2:08:39 Lex Fridman? Sure.
2:08:39 Douglas Murray? But that line of, it's a good piece of rice. If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster and meet these, greet these two imposters just the same.
2:08:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:08:50 Douglas Murray? That's a good line. It's a good line, as Kipping often, an amazing turn of line. But I do think that it's a very sensible thing to try to greet
2:09:01 Douglas Murray? triumph and disaster and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same. And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never, partly it's because I have a sort of belief in the old gods. And at the moment that I thought that I was at the moment of triumph, the fates would hitch up their skirts and run at me at a million miles an hour.
2:09:23 Douglas Murray? But it's also because I gen, anyone who knows me knows I never have a moment when I say,
2:09:32 Douglas Murray? that's just great. I feel totally fulfilled and victorious. I mean, it happened to me recently when my, when the war on the West Wind straight dinner number one in the bestseller list.
2:09:45 Lex Fridman? How long did that last in terms of your self satisfaction?
2:09:47 Douglas Murray? Didn't have.
2:09:49 Lex Fridman? Not even for a brief moment?
2:09:50 Douglas Murray? No.
2:09:53 Douglas Murray? When I first saw that it was selling, I had that moment of elation. I thought, good, I've done it, it's out. And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely. But it doesn't last, partly because I tell myself it mustn't last.
2:10:08 Lex Fridman? Because, as you said, fate hitches up its skirt. Is that skirts? I don't, this, you Brits with your, with your poetry, even when it's nauseating.
2:10:22 Lex Fridman? As of 2022, this year, what's your final analysis of the political leadership and the human mind and the human being of Donald Trump?
2:10:34 Douglas Murray? I sort of avoided this for years.
2:10:36 Lex Fridman? Just talking about Trump?
2:10:37 Douglas Murray? Tried to avoid talking about Trump for years. Same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.
2:10:41 Lex Fridman? Do you think that Trump, just sorry, on a small tangent, do you think the Trump story
2:10:46 Lex Fridman? is over or are we just done with volume one?
2:10:49 Douglas Murray? I've no idea. The people I know who know him say that he's running.
2:10:54 Douglas Murray? And, and I think that in, in general, Republicans have to, do have a choice in front of them.
2:11:04 Douglas Murray? And one friend put it to me recently, said, you've got to go in with your toughest fighter.
2:11:12 Douglas Murray? And I understand that instinct. And I also think it's a very dangerous instinct because what if your toughest fighter is also your biggest liability?
2:11:25 Douglas Murray? What's the best way to get out of the Democrat vote in 2024 than have Donald Trump running?
2:11:29 Lex Fridman? And the people that are doing the war in the West are pretty tough fighters.
2:11:34 Douglas Murray? They are. And I'm cautious about this because I know every way I tread is dangerous, but let me just, just be frank.
2:11:43 Lex Fridman? Tread gracefully.
2:11:44 Douglas Murray? I'll tread as gracefully as I can, in my Wellington boots. I, in my galoshes. I, here's, here's the thing. I think everybody knows what Trump is. I think we all knew for years. And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend that he was something he wasn't. I felt sorry for the ones who had to.
2:12:08 Douglas Murray? Pretend that, for instance, he was some devout Christian or a man of faith or a man of great integrity or all of these sorts of things, because in the public eye for years, it had been obvious that wasn't the case. But he has something extraordinary.
2:12:28 Douglas Murray? One thing is a method of communication that you've just got to say is was unbelievable.
2:12:34 Lex Fridman? In one fundamental way that you can't look away for some reason.
2:12:37 Douglas Murray? Can't look away. I mean, I've been watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016 was thrilling because those people needed clearing away. You know, Sam is just horrified. What America is going to give us another Bush? What's so great about this family?
2:12:58 Douglas Murray? America is going to give us another Clinton. We're going to choose any Clinton or Bush. Mark Stein said, whatever, we'll just wait for the day the Clintons and the Bushes into Mary and then we can really have a monarchy again. So I was very pleased to see him clear them away. I was very pleased to see him sort of raise some of the issues that needed raising. I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air and I wished it wasn't him doing it.
2:13:26 Douglas Murray? And then there was the question of him governing and it was just perfectly clear he didn't know how to govern. What he did have, however, what he does have is an incredible ability to fight. And some of the forces he was arraigned against or arraigned against him, my gosh, they would have taken down anyone else. I mean, they'd have probably done some similar BS against Ted Cruz if he, you know, or Marco Rubio. You know, they'd have said, as some people admitted, they'd have accused all these people of racism and misogyny and everything else as well, just like they did Mitt Romney, just like they did John McCain. But Trump was the one ugly enough and bruisey enough to fight.
2:14:08 Lex Fridman? And also a willingness or a lack of willingness to play sort of the civil
2:14:17 Douglas Murray? Yes.
2:14:18 Lex Fridman? game of politics, you know, at a party when like politeness gets you in trouble.
2:14:25 Douglas Murray? Yeah.
2:14:25 Lex Fridman? You show up and everybody's polite and you're just out of momentum when you're being polite. And all of a sudden you're on an island with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you into a huge amount of trouble.
2:14:36 Douglas Murray? But so Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities, but I just, you know, look, he screwed up during his time in office because he didn't achieve as much as he should have done. And you could say that about every president, but I refuse to acknowledge that two years when he had both houses in the first, the beginning, he just didn't know what levers to pull, you know? I mean, he was sitting in the office behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news. I'm sorry, that's not a president. And he couldn't fill and didn't fill positions because people knew, I mean, people who were very loyal to him, he would just, you know, he'd get them to do something loyal and then destroy them. And I think, and then we get on to the thing about, and here we get on to the, you know, what of course is very, very fractious terrain.
2:15:21 Douglas Murray? But, you know, I covered the 2020 election and I was traveling all around the States and I went to Trump rally and, and all sorts of stuff. And I, I mean, I was in DC on election night and when, and it got very ugly at one point in so-called Black Lives Matter Plaza, when it looked like Trump might win, when Florida came in and got really, I could feel the air. We're very, very heated and like some antifas people started getting into black lock and this sort of stuff. And I thought this town is going to burn, you know, if Trump wins. And in the aftermath of the vote. I was willing to hang around in Washington for a bit and then I saw it was going to drag on and I saw some of his people and others and people told me they had great evidence
2:16:05 Douglas Murray? of vote rigging and all this sort of thing. And I'm afraid I'm one of those people who doesn't believe that the evidence that they presented is good enough to justify the claim that he won the election. And I and people say, have you seen 2000 mules and have you seen anything? Look, the evidence isn't there that the that the election was won by Donald Trump.
2:16:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:16:28 Douglas Murray? And I think that what he did on January the 6th was unbelievably dangerous. And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas in our head at the same time. January 6th was not nothing, nor was it an insurrection, an attempt to stage a coup. And there's a vanishing number of people in the US was Eric Weinstein said that the it's like, this is the the roof that you have to walk along and like the the sides are very steep.
2:17:02 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:17:03 Douglas Murray? If you fall off either side.
2:17:04 Lex Fridman? Is there some sense, given the forces that are waging war in the West, you said this feeling, perhaps because of Antifa or something else, that this town is going to burn and maybe a continued feeling that this town is going to burn with the January 6th events. Are you worried about the future of the United States in the coming years because of the the there's a feeling of escalation?
2:17:34 Douglas Murray? Sure.
2:17:35 Lex Fridman? Is that just a war of Twitter or is there?
2:17:39 Douglas Murray? It's real.
2:17:40 Lex Fridman? Is there a real brewing of something?
2:17:42 Douglas Murray? Oh, it's real.
2:17:44 Lex Fridman? And how, well, let me then respond to that. How, what is the hopeful? If you.
2:17:51 Lex Fridman? If you 10 years from now, look back at the United States and say, we turned it around. What would be the reason? What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?
2:18:02 Douglas Murray? Tell you, since I, since I wrote this book, there are two things in particular that I've been really pleased that a specific type of specialist has approached me on to say that things I've written about actually have more application than I realized. One is the gratitude issue. A number of people have approached me who have gone through AA or Alcoholics Anonymous. They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA? And I thought, that's a bit personal question.
2:18:35 Douglas Murray? But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say, well, because if you go to drug rehabilitation or Alcohol Anonymous, Norm MacDonald said, it doesn't sound very anonymous. You stand up in a room, you say your name and you type on the worst things you've ever done. Sounds the opposite of anonymous. Anyhow, but they say, look, because if you go to these things, apparently you're asked to, as part of your recovery.
2:18:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:19:00 Douglas Murray? Say what you're grateful for, like list what you're grateful for. I didn't know that, by the way, until, until, until the book was out. And so it turned out to have more application than I knew. The other thing, though, is that I say that it's absolutely crucial in America that we try to find things that we agree on. And a couple of times since the book came out, I've been approached by people who are marriage counselors. But he also said, have you ever been through marriage counseling? Again, that's a very personal question. Stop asking me personal questions. No, but they, and I said, why? Well, because this is, this is one of the things that we do in couples therapy is try to find things you agree on.
2:19:43 Douglas Murray? And I think this is very important in America. And it's made much harder by the fact, and I've said this many times, but forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but it's made much harder by the fact that having different opinions is very last century. Now we all have different facts, or at least the two sides have different facts. One half of the country roughly, or let's say forty percent, thirty percent, whatever you want to put it, with a tired minority in the middle. One segment of the country believes that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and that the Russians interfered and got Donald Trump into power. Another half of the country believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
2:20:24 Douglas Murray? If you can't agree on who wins elections, it's very hard to see what you agree on as a country. That's one of the reasons I mind the war on American history and Western history is one of the things you have to agree on is at least some attitude towards your past. You don't have to agree on everything. But like, the public square has to have public heroes who are agreed to be heroes to some extent, warts and all. If you don't have that, if actually you think, for instance, like, half the country thinks founding fathers were pretty good, the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten racists and so on. If half the country basically thinks it would have been better if Columbus had taken a different turn, never found America, gone back home and said, I don't know, nothing out there, that would have been better.
2:21:08 Douglas Murray? And the other half's pretty glad in the end that we've got America.
2:21:15 Douglas Murray? You know, you've got to agree on something. And I just see in America, so I do think we've got to try to find things to agree on, like a reasonable attitude towards the past. That's why that matters. And again, I stress, I'm not trying to say that everything in the American past was good. God knows that wouldn't stand up for a second scrutiny or self scrutiny. But nor was it all bad. This wasn't a country formed in sin and in an iradicable sin. It wasn't founded in 1619 in order to make the country wicked and incapable of escaping that wickedness. You know, these are things that will matter enormously in the years ahead. Because if you can't agree on anything, including who your heroes are.
2:22:01 Douglas Murray? Like, the whole thing is just one massive division, and we'll see what I think we're already seeing, which is people basically going to states where it's more like the life they want to live. And some people say to me, well, that's okay. And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that. That's possible, but it's also, it eradicates part of what has been American public life, which is the ability to look at each other and discuss face to face. And I see things like this bomb placed under America the other week with the Supreme Court leak, the draft leak, as being just a further example of that. I'm very, very worried about it in America. And, and because if America screws up, everything, everything else in the world goes.
2:22:47 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there is the degree to which America is still the beacon of these ideas on, on which the, the country was founded and has been able to live out in better and better forms, sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles versus like-
2:23:04 Douglas Murray? And with, and with the desire to improve-
2:23:07 Lex Fridman? Yeah, constant.
2:23:07 Douglas Murray? An imperfect union.
2:23:10 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Well, I generally have hope that people want to sort of, in terms of gratitude, people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful. That is, it's a better life psychologically. The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within. So I just feel that people will long for that and will find that. And that's, that's the American way. Some of the division that we reveal now has to do with new technologies like social media-
2:23:40 Douglas Murray? Yes.
2:23:40 Lex Fridman? That kind of is, is a small kind of deviation from the path we're on because it's a new, we've got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons.
2:23:49 Douglas Murray? Yeah, which is relatively new. But we need to find reasonable attitudes towards these things. And that's why I say like, it matters how you imbibe feedback on social media, because we might, we're all going through it to some extent.
2:24:04 Lex Fridman? We're learning.
2:24:04 Douglas Murray? And we're learning. And we've got to learn how to do this without going mad, you know? I say this, as my minimalist call to friends in this era was, the main job is not to go insane.
2:24:18 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, like walk towards sanity.
2:24:25 Lex Fridman? Because, you know, I'm sure there's a Hunter S. Thompson quote in there, like insanity on the weekends can be at least fun. Okay. Do you have advice for young people that just put down their TikTok and are listening to this podcast in high school and college about how to have a career, how to have a life they can be proud of?
2:24:49 Douglas Murray? It's a very broad question, but of course, I mean, I can give specific advice for people who want to be writers and so on, but that's a bit niche, maybe.
2:24:57 Lex Fridman? Well, writers will be very interesting. Sorry to interrupt. Also, how to put your ideas down on paper and think that ideas develop them and have the guts to go to a large audience, especially when the ideas are sort of controversial or dangerous or difficult.
2:25:12 Douglas Murray? Well, the main thing to do is to read. When I was a schoolboy, I would ever have a book in my pocket, the side pocket of my jacket, one in the side pocket, and would read. And that wasn't just because I was swattish in some way, but because I discovered, probably at some point in my early teens, I discovered something. I wrote about this once. I discovered that books were dangerous, which was a thrilling discovery.
2:25:43 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:25:46 Douglas Murray? I discovered that they could contain anything. And also, people didn't know what you were reading. I remember, I got far too young in age. I read The Doors of Perception of Aldous Huxley. And I didn't make head or tail of it, probably. But I knew that it was about something really interesting and dangerous. And I thought constantly, when I read poetry or read history, I think, I was just constantly thrilled and wanted to know more. And
2:26:22 Douglas Murray? And if you want to become a writer, you have to be a reader.
2:26:27 Douglas Murray? Um, you have to read the best stuff. Um, and, and, you know, obviously people disagree or agree on what that is. And you'll find the people that really impress you. But I know I just came across certain writers who just knocked me off my feet. Um, and when you find those people, like, read everything. And cling on to them and find other people like that, find other writers like that, or people who are connected.
2:26:59 Douglas Murray? By history or scholarship or circles or whatever.
2:27:03 Lex Fridman? For you, was it fiction or nonfiction? Is there a particular books that you just remember or just give you pause?
2:27:09 Douglas Murray? Well, I remember that the first book that absolutely threw me was The Lord of the Flies. William Golding, which used to be a signed text and everyone's a bit snotty about because it's so popular. Um, but I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book I read. In that I had been used to the world of children's literature of everything ends up fine in the end. The lost all get found. You know, and this was the first book I'd read where that's not the case. Where the world turns out differently. And, and I remember for days afterwards, I was just in a state of shock. I, I couldn't believe what I'd just discovered.
2:27:53 Douglas Murray? And partly because I sort of intuited it must be true.
2:27:57 Douglas Murray? And of course, that is not to say that The Lord of the Flies, there's lots of scholarship on. What children do in the situation of being on the island, when they do congregate and anyhow. But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world and it was shocking and thrilling and, um, and I wanted more of it.
2:28:15 Lex Fridman? It was dangerous.
2:28:17 Douglas Murray? And it was dangerous. And then, of course, when I became interested in sex, let alone when I realized I was gay, I realized books were a very, very good way to learn about what I was. And that was even more dangerous in a way. And I thought, blimey, nobody knows what I know. And.
2:28:35 Lex Fridman? You discovered sex? That was an invention in books? What do you mean?
2:28:38 Douglas Murray? No, what I mean is, no, no, no, no. What I mean is that is that one of the things that gay people have when they're growing up is that you have this terribly big secret and you don't think the world will ever know. You hope the world will never know. And it's been called by one psychologist, the little boy with a big secret. And so if you discover that other people have the same secret, there's a sort of, thank God for that. But I mean, that's just a version of what everybody gets in reading in a way, which is the thrill of discovery that somebody else thought, something you thought only you'd thought. I mean,
2:29:18 Douglas Murray? one of the greatest thrills in all of literature is when a voice comes across the centuries and seems to leave a handprint, you know?
2:29:26 Lex Fridman? It makes you feel a little bit less alone because somebody else feels, sees the world the same way, is the same way.
2:29:32 Douglas Murray? That's what C.S. Lewis says, said to have said, we read to know we're not alone. But we don't only read to know we're not alone, we read to become other people. I mean, I think I saw in books a version of the life I wanted to live, and then I decided to live it. And fortunate enough to have done so.
2:29:54 Douglas Murray? I wanted to live in the world of ideas and books and debate. I wanted to live in the debates of my time, you know? And I remember, I remember when, like a lot of people, I read Auden when I was young. And, you know, certain lines obviously stuck with me, but I, that poem of his, which everybody, you know, knows and which he hated, September the first, nineteen thirty nine. I remember certain lines in that just like whacked me. What's that one? Sitting on a dive for the second street, degraded alone. At the end of a low dishonest decade. Of course, there's a problem with that line, which is you kind of want to be living at the end of a low dishonest decade as well.
2:30:38 Douglas Murray? It sounds sort of cool in a way. You know, you're the only person who sees it. But so, yeah, anyhow, that's a diversion. But the point is, if you want to be a writer, you've got to be a reader. Apart from anything else, you discover the the lilt of language and the the things you can do. And I I've read people who, and I still do, who I think, my God, I didn't know. How did you do that? In fact, books, books for me now and articles and other things fall into two categories. One is, I know how you did that. And the other is, I don't know how you did that. And the and the best feeling as a writer is when you do the second one. And I've and it happens occasionally in my writing life.
2:31:21 Lex Fridman? Will you almost like return to something you've written or like right after you?
2:31:24 Douglas Murray? No, the moment you write it.
2:31:25 Lex Fridman? You wonder, how did I do that?
2:31:27 Douglas Murray? Yes. That's that's the most, I've never said that before. That's the happiest thing in writing.
2:31:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:31:34 Douglas Murray? Very occasionally, it sounds, but I mean, I've occasionally finished something. Funny enough, it happened some years ago in a long piece I wrote about the artist Baskett. I finished the piece and I gasped. I didn't know, because because that's also a thing with writing is you, you, you, it's not, sometimes people say you need to write in order to know what you think. That's not quite true. Sometimes you, that's a very bad piece of advice for some writers who don't know what they think, and it's not going to become clearer if they just start typing.
2:32:07 Lex Fridman? Fair enough, yeah.
2:32:11 Douglas Murray? Sometimes it is true that you, there's a thought that's just waiting there and a clarity that comes across and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain. And by the time you typed it, you, you just go, yes. That's the greatest feeling as a writer.
2:32:28 Lex Fridman? Almost like it came from somewhere else.
2:32:31 Douglas Murray? That's, that's what, um, uh, Baccunian says about, you know, what's the moment? It's Tom Stoppard's favorite quote about, you know, Baccunian saying, what happens in the moment where the right, where the writer's pen, when he pauses, where does he go in that moment?
2:32:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Hmm. That's so interesting.
2:32:50 Lex Fridman? That's that's because I think the answer to that question will help us explain consciousness and all those other weird things about the human mind.
2:32:59 Douglas Murray? Yeah. So that was advice for writers. I didn't really give any advice for people in general.
2:33:04 Lex Fridman? Is that, oh, you want to give health advice?
2:33:06 Douglas Murray? No.
2:33:07 Lex Fridman? To channel Churchill and?
2:33:09 Douglas Murray? No, I don't want to give health advice.
2:33:10 Lex Fridman? Clearly, because you imply that Churchill was one of your early guides in that aspect. So when you discovered your sexuality, let me ask about love.
2:33:22 Lex Fridman? Too personal, far too personal of a question to ask a Brit, but what was that like? And broadly speaking, what's the role of love in the human condition?
2:33:36 Lex Fridman? Sex and love, and for you personally, discovering that you were and maybe telling the world that you were gay.
2:33:46 Douglas Murray? I'm very perilously personal. I do actually have a sort of rule that I don't talk about in my personal life.
2:33:53 Lex Fridman? Rules are meant to be broken.
2:33:54 Douglas Murray? Okay, well, I'll break it a little bit.
2:33:57 Douglas Murray? The, the, the, one of the ways in which growing up and raising your gay differs from growing up and being straight is that it's almost inevitable that your first passions will be unrequited.
2:34:12 Lex Fridman? Oh, wow. I never thought about that. Yeah.
2:34:15 Douglas Murray? Now, that's not to say, I mean, you know, there's plenty of unrequited love among young men for young women, young women for young men, plenty of, you know, that. But it's almost inevitable if you're gay that your first, you know, passions will be totally unrequited, because the odds are that the person you question will not be gay.
2:34:35 Lex Fridman? So the experience of love is mostly heartbreak?
2:34:39 Douglas Murray? Is heartbreak and disappointment.
2:34:41 Lex Fridman? And that heartbreak can be beautiful, too.
2:34:43 Douglas Murray? Of course.
2:34:44 Lex Fridman? Formative.
2:34:44 Douglas Murray? Well, as, again, it comes back to the thing of if you're a writer or something, because you can always do something with it. That's why all writers are sort of not to be trusted.
2:34:54 Lex Fridman? I didn't trust you the moment you walked in here.
2:35:01 Douglas Murray? No, I mean, it's a famous problem with the writers because you always think, well, I could use that. It's dangerous. It's a dangerous thing and all writers should.
2:35:09 Lex Fridman? It's almost like a drug, right?
2:35:11 Douglas Murray? No, it's not like a drug. It's the fear that all things, even the greatest suffering, it could be material.
2:35:21 Lex Fridman? What's the danger in that exactly? That seeing the material in the human experience? You don't experience it fully?
2:35:28 Douglas Murray? You don't experience it fully and you might be using it. I had a friend who wrote a poem about a friend who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney in the 60s. And he said, he knew at the moment he was told about his friend's death, a tiny bit of him thought, I could use this for a poem. And he did, and the poem was wonderful. But there's always that slight guilt for writers of, am I going to use that? Anyhow, that's a divergence.
2:35:51 Lex Fridman? Life is full of guilty pleasures, and I think that's one of them. Because if you feel that guilt, really, what you're doing is you're capturing that moment and you're going to impact the lives of many, many people by writing about that moment because it's going to stimulate something that resonates with those people because they had similar kinds of memories about a loss and a passion towards somebody that they had to lose. So, don't,
2:36:14 Douglas Murray? yes, but there's a good sign, perhaps. More obvious, perhaps, problem is reporting from war zones or bad places and wanting to find bad stories because it's useful. And there is a definite guilt you get from that sort of thing, like, the worse the situation, the more useful. Anyhow, no, so that's sort of the only difference that happens from growing up being gay. And it means that most, certainly in my generation, most gay men came to sexual or romantic maturity later. And there's lots of explanations of that maybe being one of the reasons for perceived or otherwise promiscuity among gay men, which is, I think, more easily persuaded by the
2:36:58 Douglas Murray? fact that gay men behave like men would if women were men.
2:37:05 Lex Fridman? That's that's one explanation, but it is both a feature and a bug that you come to sexual flourishing later in life. That could be seen as a
2:37:15 Douglas Murray? Yeah.
2:37:16 Lex Fridman? In the trajectory of human life, that could be a positive or a negative.
2:37:20 Douglas Murray? Yeah.
2:37:20 Lex Fridman? But what's broadly speaking is the role of love in the human condition, Douglas.
2:37:27 Douglas Murray? Well, it's the nearest thing we have to finding the point.
2:37:31 Lex Fridman? What is the point? What's what's the meaning of life? Let's go there.
2:37:35 Douglas Murray? So what's the meaning is a hard one, of course. Where is the meaning is slightly easier.
2:37:42 Douglas Murray? And I'd say that everyone can find that. You gravitate towards the places you find meaning. Now, there's a conservative answer to this, which is quite useful, and it's certainly more useful than any others, because the conservative answer is find meaning where people have found it before.
2:37:58 Douglas Murray? Which is a very, very good answer.
2:37:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:38:00 Douglas Murray? If if your ancestors have found meaning in a place of worship or a particular canon of work, go there, because it's been proven by time to be able to give you the goods.
2:38:17 Douglas Murray? Much more sensible than saying, hey, I don't know, discover new ways of meaning.
2:38:26 Douglas Murray? But love is
2:38:30 Douglas Murray? love is probably the nearest thing we can have
2:38:35 Douglas Murray? to the divine on earth. And of course, the problem of what exactly, what type of love we mean is a is an issue.
2:38:45 Lex Fridman? Well, that goes to the fact that you don't like definitions anyway.
2:38:49 Douglas Murray? I do like definitions. I just think they need to be pinned down. But let's not, let's not go there at the moment, because it's
2:38:58 Lex Fridman? Let's not pin down love at the moment.
2:39:01 Douglas Murray? Well, no, because as you know, I mean, because of the different varieties of love and the fact that we have one word for it in our culture and that it means an awful lot of things and we don't delineate it.
2:39:09 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:39:10 Douglas Murray? Well, but let's say human love with the greatest fulfillment in sexual fulfillment, in sexual love with another person is probably the greatest intimation you can have of what might otherwise only be superseded by divine love. And it's the the sense that all young lovers have, which is that they've just walked through the low door in the garden and found themselves in bliss.
2:39:49 Douglas Murray? And that this is, there's a beautiful, beautiful poem of, can I read it to you?
2:39:57 Lex Fridman? Yes, please.
2:39:59 Douglas Murray? I'll try to find, there's a beautiful poem of Philip Larkin's, which slightly says what I'm, I'm, I'm trying not to duck your question by referring to other people, but.
2:40:12 Lex Fridman? Maybe that's the best way to answer the question.
2:40:14 Douglas Murray? Could be.
2:40:15 Lex Fridman? Is to read, read, read a poem.
2:40:18 Douglas Murray? So there's a poem by Philip Larkin called High Windows, which is, which is remarkable because he, he came to sexual, he was straight, he had a rather unhappy sex life, but he came to sexual fruition in the 40s and 50s and all the hell that involved. And he took us, he took what I regard as being a really remarkable and important view on the sexual revolution of the 60s, which is that most people of his generation, most older people resented the young.
2:40:59 Douglas Murray? They resented the freedom they had and actually they pretended the freedom was terrible and it was always getting lightly done. And Philip Larkin, rather surprisingly, he was a very conservative person, took a different view. And he says it in this poem, and the opening of the poem is, he says, "When I see a couple of kids and guess he's fucking her and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise. Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives. Bonds and gestures pushed to one side like an outdated combine harvester. And everyone young going down the long slide to happiness endlessly. I wonder if anyone looked at me forty years back and thought,
2:41:40 Douglas Murray? 'That'll be the life, no god anymore, or sweating in the dark about hell and that, or having to hide what you think of the priest. He and his lot will all go down the long slide like free bloody birds.' And immediately, rather than words, comes the thought of high windows, the sun comprehending glass, and beyond it the deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless."
2:42:11 Lex Fridman? The divine. He found it.
2:42:14 Douglas Murray? He found it in seeing a couple of young kids and knowing that one of them was wearing a diaphragm. Do you see, I mean, it's first of all, it's very counterintuitive, but secondly, this is the point that sex had been so tied up with misery.
2:42:31 Douglas Murray? I mean, people don't remember this now when they talk about the past. I mean, there's one of my favorite books, Stefan's likes, The World of Yesterday, including descriptions of what it was like trying to have sex in pre First World War Vienna. You know, all the men ended up going to female prostitutes, you know, so many of them got syphilis. And this was their first experience of sex. It was so goddamn awful and they were stuck with it all their lives. And so there's lots of stuff that's gone better in our last century. That's one of them. But you ask about love. Yes, I do think that love is basically
2:43:06 Douglas Murray? the thing that gives us the best glimpse of the divine.
2:43:09 Lex Fridman? And by the way, sex, liberating sex, doesn't buy you love.
2:43:17 Douglas Murray? No. I mean, it throws in an entirely.
2:43:21 Douglas Murray? It threw in another set of problems.
2:43:25 Lex Fridman? If there's any meaning on top of all of that is we like to find problems and solve that as a human species, and sometimes we even create problems.
2:43:39 Lex Fridman? Douglas, thank you for highlighting all the problems of human civilization and giving us a glimmer of hope for the future. This is an incredible conversation. Thank you for talking today. It's a huge honor. Thank you.
2:43:50 Douglas Murray? It's very kind of you to say that. Thank you.
2:43:53 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Murray himself. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
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